


A Sable Silver'd

by PetrarchanConceit



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Anal Sex, Fellatio, HW spoilers, Kit Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd", M/M, Masturbation, NSFW, Particular Projection of Elizabethan/Jacobean ideologies, Projection of Early Modern Cultural Contexts, Relentless Referencing to and Direct Quotation of a Bard not Thancred, StB Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:07:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26074636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PetrarchanConceit/pseuds/PetrarchanConceit
Summary: He loved Aymeric; he was sure of it now.  And he wanted to love him, to make love to him rather than simply rut or fuck.  In regard to the consummation of that particular wish, however, he was, ironically, as much a virgin as Aymeric himself, because Estinien Wyrmblood had never made love to anyone in his life.
Relationships: Aymeric de Borel/Estinien Wyrmblood, Haurchefant Greystone/Warrior of Light, Lucia goe Junius/Artoirel de Fortemps
Comments: 21
Kudos: 71





	1. Where We Lay Our Scene

"Oh no," he replied, diffident. "I'm hopeless when it comes to a true feeling for the piece." This was a lie. "A deficiency not shared by your granddaughter if her most recent performance be anything by which we can judge." Another lie. "I fear I am nothing but a somewhat adequate technician, fingers committed to the keys but heart estranged." Perhaps, here was the biggest lie of all. Ser Aymeric de Borel was nothing but a fully engaged heart, beating, brimming, bursting with an earnestness that begged to be beloved by...everyone. He craved connection -- a predictable outcome of his beauty and his shame.

  
To be that beautiful, well, if nothing else it allowed him a rare understanding of irony from a very young age. One would have thought being beautiful would have drawn others in -- to his heart, to his arms -- as he so ardently wished. But his beauty, from boyhood, led him to realizations that would have been difficult to acknowledge for someone not in possession of his unique combination of intellect and sensibility. People were crumbly things, like the cookie soldiers he helped roll out in the kitchen of the Borel manor at Starlight. Everyone, always, seemed to be jostling against each other, desperate to assert a superiority of which each and every one of them was, internally, doubtful. That doubt was the crumbly thing and the thing that could burn your fingers if you touched it straight out of the oven. Aymeric's beauty was the oven. When exposed to its undeniable heat, knowing their internal temperature flagged in comparison, those he knew hardened to him. They couldn't compete, not even the girls -- a truth that turned insecurity to burning resentment.

The intensity of his beauty could neither be softened nor abrogated entirely, unless completely obfuscated under the visor of a Temple Knights helm -- which he'd happily donned as a young knight, freed for a spell from the pained strain of others' eyes as they tried desperately not to stare at him. But there were other ways he could make himself small, and that was the trick really: when one was clearly the most clever and undeniably the most beautiful person in the room, one had to employ strategies to make certain one was _not_ also the most hated. Diminish yourself. Make light of every talent, every accomplishment and emphasize, augment, exaggerate each and every failing. Most importantly, turn all attention away from yourself and allow others to indulge in the one thing Aymeric found they seemed to enjoy above all else: let them talk about themselves, their loves, their lives, their loathings, endlessly. And listen, truly listen. Focus. Insert the affirming noises and assert the expected aphorisms in all the right places, filling in the edges of a mostly one-sided conversation. If all this work, and it was work -- so exhausting to retain such precise focus, to exert such fervent affirmation -- did not make people love him, exactly, it certainly made them love how they themselves were reflected in the mirror of him. That had been...useful.

Make no mistake, Aymeric was all earnestness in his unknowing wielding of what were ultimately the weapons of a practiced politician. His unconscious manipulation was out of a desire for contact, affirmation, affection. But his mastery of these techniques was assuredly what had made him Lord Commander of the Temple Knights at such a young age, that and the fact that he was as undeniably the Archbishop's bastard as he was undeniably beautiful. This was not a case of nepotism, however. Aymeric's unorthodox connection to Ishgard's leadership, did not elevate, but lowered him, made noble and knight alike feel their superiority to the poor unacknowledged bastard, whatever his personal charms. It made him less threatening.

So, finally, having seen twenty-some Ishgardian Summers wither in their pride and another half-dozen Ishgardian years admonished for that pride by being sunk in eternal Winter, Aymeric de Borel, Lord Commander of the Temple Knights, was not exactly hated any longer, but he wasn't loved either -- especially so since his affectionate adoptive parents had passed. Still, as when he was a boy, Aymeric had few friends. Still, as a grown man, he'd had no lovers.

What he did have, at the moment, was the particularly supercilious Countess de Durendaire eating out of the palm of his hand as he warmly exhorted her granddaughter's accomplishment at the virginals above his own universally acknowledged talent.

"Of course, of course," he said, agreeing with the Countess's assertion that correct feeling was truly a more superior expression of talent than a merely mechanistic rendering of the piece according to how it was written on the page. "Indeed," he said, trying desperately to feel true interest when she shifted the conversation to discuss another granddaughter's superior application of her considerable talents to the mandolin. By this time, however, his honest focus on the Countess's features made him notice how she had started sliding her eyes to the side of his face, to the side and behind him, as though whatever she saw there made her distinctly uncomfortable. She abruptly excused herself, apparently thinking it beneath her to acknowledge whatever it was that was causing her such discomfort. Aymeric had a pretty good idea, however.

"Estinien," he said, without turning, "what brings the Azure Dragoon to a party whose invitation he had previously declined?"

  
"Never declined it, my lord. I simply didn't answer," said the low voice behind him, a slight, slight roughening of his vowels betraying him as a shepherd's son stuck amidst the smoothly-intoned syllables of the Ishgardian elite. Aymeric turned. Of course he was wearing his prickly full-plate. Of course he was wearing the obscuring helm. Estinien begrudged all but a few the sight of his own striking features.

  
"Why are you in full armor?" Aymeric asked, smiling despite himself. If one was going to have very few friends, counting the most powerful defender of Ishgard among them was at least something, despite said friend's often irreverent behavior. "You told me this very morning that the Fury Herself couldn't incline you to attend," he continued.

  
"I'm hungry. Smelled the meat. I also, frankly, thought I'd spare you the embarrassment of your own ridiculous empathy," the armored man snorted. "Whatever it is that makes you so desperate to feel for these people, to commiserate with their petty concerns, is something I will never understand. I'm embarrassed for you really," Estinien said, his tone one of archly mocking concern as he crossed his arms and settled more heavily against the wall. Aymeric just laughed, relaxing a little as he relinquished the necessary intensity of his relentless focus now that he was in the company of a legitimate friend. "I'll admit one thing, though, in relation to House Durandaire," Estinien confided, flicking his chin in the direction of the departed Countess and looking smug, "those granddaughters' 'superior' talents reside more in the application of tongues to flesh than fingers to musical instruments -- both of them, if you must know. Virginals, indeed," he snorted.

  
"I must needs not know," replied Aymeric, trying hard to contain his mirth now, choking with the strain of it as tears formed in the corners of his eyes. Because of his status as the Azure, Estinien, despite what one would expect from the Countess's refusal to acknowledge even his presence, enjoyed a degree of celebrity among the younger members of the nobility -- his recent turn as a renegade, having absconded into the highlands with the Holy See's precious relic, somehow only increasing his allure. Not one to have any degree of compunction in regard to taking what was offered, he bedded as many as he could as often as possible, frequently in multiples at a time. Estinien enjoyed more than one set of hands on his body. "You're a very wicked man, Estinien Wyrmblood," Aymeric laughed.

  
"As wicked as thou art saintly, my friend," replied Estinien. "I half expect a halo to sprout from the back of your head any day now. Come on, now, Angel" he continued, changing course, "make your apologies and let's get out of this mess. I'll buy you a girl...perhaps a boy" he paused here, allowing the suggestion to hang, curious to see Aymeric's reaction. When none came other than a slightly exasperated shake of the other man's head, Estinien sighed. "Oh, my friend, why not make that budding halo slip a little for once?" Aymeric just smiled and turned to take his leave of his hosts.

  
"I'll meet you outside," he told the dragoon over his retreating shoulder. Estinien bolted. He hated stuffy parties, stuffy nobles, hated being inside, really. He liked the dark and the moonlight and Aymeric -- that last one something he had only recently admitted even to himself.

  
It distracted him, this recent acknowledgment of his feelings for his friend. Estinien had only ever bedded women, his unrelenting arousal, from the earliest age he could remember, reserved exclusively for the so-called fairer sex. Hells, he had willingly forsaken his virginity to a neighbor-girl three years his senior only weeks before Ferndale was razed. Passionate Shepherd indeed, he thought to himself, the first lines of the poem coming to his mind unbidden: _"Come live with me and be my love, [a]nd we will all the pleasures prove [t]hat valleys, groves, hills, and fields, [w]oods, or steepy mountain yields."_ That the sentiments of this most favoured and familiar verse were now inextricably linked in his head with an image of his own mouth stuffed full of Aymeric's cock as his friend writhed naked on the sweet-scented grass beneath them shocked Estinien a bit. Initially, he had tried to convince himself that it was because of Aymeric's beauty and his quiet compassionate kindness -- characteristics inexorably linked with the feminine in his and Estinien's world. Aymeric being associated so heavily with such female-coded qualities had obviously caused Estinien's mind to simply slip up -- to start regarding him as something possible to desire.

  
Sodomite meant many things in Estinien's world, as much a man who raised his sword against his master as one who loved another man with his body. Often, however, it was simply used as a disparagement against someone who either ignored or outright dismissed the accepted conventions of a suffocatingly rigid society. Estinien was precisely such a someone. So he decided he didn't care. If loving Aymeric made him a sodomite, then he embraced the word. He would gladly endure a lifetime's worth of his stupid culture's derision and disgust for a chance to love his friend truly -- to commit to reality the urgings of his heart and cock. Indeed, if these desires were strong enough to break through his single-minded drive to revenge himself on the Dravanians, if they allowed him, even momentarily, to consider something other for himself than a death speared between tooth and claw and hot-fired breath, he couldn't bring himself to think poorly of them.

  
"Aymeric," he hailed as he alighted from the second story window through which he had escaped to click his armoured heels down next to his friend. With his torso crouched low over deeply bent knees, to best absorb the impact of course, Estinien, for a moment, looked like a supplicant bowed in service before Aymeric's starlit, seraphic presence. He looked up before straightening to his full height, allowing his friend a flash of eyes under helm and then gesturing for Aymeric to follow him.

  
"Into what tangled distractions are you leading me, my friend," Aymeric laughed, already knowing where they were headed. Only Estinien would be brazen enough to lead him to his own manor; unmindful of proper courtesies in regard to a legitimate invitation, Estinien simply invited himself to drink Aymeric's wine and lounge before his fire. "No scions of the High Houses to deflower tonight, Estinien?" Aymeric needled affectionately. "I had thought there was at least one Dzemael virgin denied your attentions."

  
"No reports, requests, requisitions to entice your ever-scribbling quill, Lord Commander," Estinien rejoined, making a face at the mention of House Dzemael, his least favourite noble establishment. "Truly, this evening I'd rather aid in a long-deferred deflowering -- the last scion of a lesser house," he said, smirking meaningfully at Aymeric.

  
Aymeric froze, his eyes widening. He'd endured plenty of good-natured teasing about his virginity from both Estinien and his other closest friend, Lord Haurchefant Greystone. Haurchefant, another bastard like himself, with his relaxed and enthusiastic attitude toward all things carnal, had gone as far as to proposition Aymeric in earnest; he would willingly initiate Aymeric into the pleasures of physical love. Aymeric had considered it, but he hadn't, in the end, wanted to be just another on his friend's long list of lovers, no matter how highly he rated on said list. Also, he was ever-mindful of his shame, of the fact that his very existence was the result of a transgression of the body -- that ecstatic moment of the body in pleasure that his world somehow found so mortifying. Aymeric, like his friend Haurchefant, was transgressing pleasure made flesh, and to compound that reality by committing the additional bodily transgression of loving another man, well, Aymeric wouldn't risk it for a casual encounter. Also, he strongly suspected that if the two most prominent bastards in Ishgard rubbed their pleasure-made flesh against flesh, it might just blow the whole Fury-forsaken city clean off its precipice and down into the abyss.

  
But Estinien... the way he had phrased that last statement... was Estinien suggesting that he wished to relieve Aymeric of his current sexual status, or, rather, lack thereof? Was Estinien propositioning him? That was another matter entirely, because Aymeric was in love with Estinien and had lived without hope of the man returning his sentiments for most of the years he'd known him. This was the true secret underlying the most angelic of the Knights Most Heavenly's prolonged virginity: despite experiencing fairly intense physical attraction to various men and women he had known over the years, Aymeric had not the heart to give himself to anyone he did not love, and he loved only Estinien. Aymeric blinked, blushed, pulled himself out of his head and back into the moment. He tripped over a reply, sputtering.

"What?" asked Estinien, his brow creasing and an unintended flush rising to his own cheeks. "You didn't think..." he started, narrowing his eyes. "I only meant what I said back at the party -- that I'd buy you a professional pleasurer." He studied Aymeric's face intently for a moment, his predatory senses heightened. Yes! There it was. His friend's studied, steady, carefully arranged expression had slipped... and there was a yearning underneath, a yearning for him. The realization startled Estinien in an unexpected way, pumping ice down his spine rather than heat through his belly. He could have Aymeric; he was sure of it now. He could claim that glorious, pristine body for his own, perhaps even tonight, right now, if he wanted. And he wanted...oh, how he _wanted_. But this time, this one single time in his entire Fury-fucked life since Ferndale, he chafed against his inherent heedlessness, his reckless desire to charge forward into his own urgings. Estinien needed some time to think, to compose himself -- at least a couple of minutes.

  
"Listen, Aymeric, what say you meet me back at the manor in a quarter bell's time? I have something to attend to at the barracks, something I neglected earlier this evening in my haste to affect your rescue," he said, desperate to slide back into his customary swagger.

  
"We can walk over together, Estinien. I don't mind waiting," returned the other man.

  
"Nay, nay, I wouldn't think of it. Get yourself before a fire. Un-stopper something good, the single-malt, maybe," Estinien continued, desperate now to get Aymeric beyond his own reach.

  
"Wait -- are we celebrating something? Is it your Nameday? No. Wait, is it my Nameday?" asked the Lord Commander, realizing suddenly, with the whirl of all his responsibilities lately, that he couldn't precisely reckon the number attached to the night. His management of the ever-present war against the Dravanians, alongside his quiet campaign to ease the Holy See into wider relations with the Eorzan Alliance, a campaign perhaps pushed into abeyance by the recent tragedy in Ul'dah and Haurchefant's subsequent announcement that the remains of the culled scions would soon be arriving within Ishgard's walls -- Hydalyn's Chosen in tow -- made Aymeric feel somewhat overwhelmed.

  
"Maybe..." replied Estinien softly, the word slipping out unbidden.

  
"Ah, I see. There is someone you've yet to attend -- a pretty dragoon perhaps?" Aymeric said, forcing a sweet smile. Estinien could spy the wistfulness in it now, however, and was desperate to be away. "I'd have thought a quarter of a bell too soon even for you, my friend," the dark-haired man continued.

  
"I'm nothing but efficient in all my strokes," replied the dragoon, unabashedly, smirk fitted back in place, as he sprung to the air in the direction of his quarters. "A quarter of a bell, then, Aymeric -- not any longer than half of one," he yelled over his shoulder at his friend.

  
With Aymeric safely sent, Estinien committed himself full to the air, hurling his body toward the Vault's spires. He did it on purpose, choosing Halone's Holiest of Houses as the sight of his debauch; indeed, The Vault was his favourite spot to relieve himself when he desired simply a moment of ecstatic forgetting without the complication of partners. Settling into a nook between heavens-grasping shadows, he reached between his point-sharpened plate to retrieve his own jutting protrusion, not bothering even with the removal of his gauntlet, needing neither warmth nor softness but only Aymeric, just the thought of him, and the slightest of steel-smoothed stroking. Finishing quickly, semen dripping down his gauntlet, down his breeches, down his greaves -- spattering the spires of Halone's House -- Estinien could finally take a mostly lust-free breath and consider his options. He loved Aymeric; he was sure of it now. And he wanted to love him, to make love to him rather than simply rut or fuck. In regard to the consummation of that particular wish, however, he was, ironically, as much a virgin as Aymeric himself, because Estinien Wyrmblood had never made love to anyone in his life.

  
His edge was off now though, and maybe, with just a touch of that fine single-malt liquor, not too much, he might safely manage a kiss -- a kiss that promised a slower, sweeter loving for them both. Estinien exhaled. Then he leapt. Aymeric was waiting.


	2. A Comedy in Five Acts

"I'm the Fury's Fool," Aymeric whispered softly to himself, standing staring into the fire. He was at home, layers shed, snug in his library and already two fingers full of the finest scotch among House de Borel's extensive collection of spirits -- the very bottle Estinien had requested. Aymeric was waiting, but with very little hope. He'd felt the slip, felt Estinien's eyes catch out his longing, usually as carefully concealed as Estinien's own helm-covered gaze. He had thought his friend might bolt from it.

And, besides, this would not be the first time Estinien had buggered off into the night, disappointing Aymeric's expectation of a visit. He'd offer his apologies and an explanation several days hence and Aymeric would laugh and forgive him, as he ever did.

Thus convinced of his impending disappointment, the Lord Commander jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder, snapping around and hurling himself backwards into the grating on the hearth; he crashed into it and its accompanying poker, bellows and tongs with a tremendous clash of wrought iron on marble. Worse even, he was now standing too close to the fire and the left leg of his trousers was beginning to smoke. It caught flame fully just as Estinien, whose unexpected touch was indeed what had initiated the debacle, grabbed him by both hands and pulled him stumbling from the hearth.

"Aymeric!" Estinien shouted, still holding onto both his hands. "You're on fire!"

"That would appear to be the case," Aymeric answered numbly, dazed. They looked at each other for a moment... and then two sets of hands simultaneously stripped Aymeric of his trousers and four booted feet stamped at the offending pile of cloth, putting out the flames.

"My Lord!" shouted an older man who appeared in the now open door of the library, Aymeric's steward. Another pair of eyes peeped in behind the man's shoulders, probably the housekeeper-cook, his wife; together the married couple comprised the full retinue of resident House de Borel servants. "We heard the noise, smelled the smoke," the steward said, slightly lifting a bucket of water he held in his hands. Aymeric could see, as they drew further into the room, that husband and wife both bore buckets and bewildered expressions.

There was the smoke and the noise of course, in the middle of the night, and there was the mess of scattered hearth accessories spilled across the floor, more than enough, indeed, to account for his servants' collective confusion, but there was also the fact that Aymeric was standing in the middle of his library, stripped down to his shorts, with both his hands still tightly clasped by a man whose features they had never before beheld, a complete stranger. And their young lord's pants were still smoking on the rug. The steward came over to where they lay and peremptorily dumped his bucket over-top the ruined trousers.

"Estinien," said Aymeric, dropping his hands. "'Tis Estinien," he gestured toward his friend.

"Ser Estinien?" replied the steward. Like most Ishgardians, Aymeric's household staff had never seen the dragoon's exposed face. Estinien's visits to the manor, while never numerous, were exclusively conducted _after_ the staff were in bed. Estinien gave a sharp nod and a low grunt. "Evening, Yvonne, Gerard," he croaked in his now literally smoke-filled voice.

"Are you hurt, love," asked the wide-eyed, rosy-faced cook -- a hyuran woman, still quite pretty in middle age -- as she set down her bucket and pushed past her towering husband to kneel by Aymeric's reddened shin. Aymeric smiled. He'd been half in love with the woman for most of his childhood, burying his head in her ample bosom when feeling dejected -- it being a nigh requisite condition of their employment that cooks possess such bosoms -- until his increased age and height pushed the gesture past the bounds of decency. When he'd been sad, Yvonne had funneled him the sweet things he loved. She still did. "I'll fetch the ointment," she said, straightening and heading to the doorway.

After having retrieved the burn cream from the kitchen, she headed back to her young lord's library, pausing in the doorway as something struck her. They made quite the pretty pair, she thought, looking at Estinien and Aymeric standing side-by-side in the middle of the room, still unsure of what to do with themselves, somewhat shocked and gaping. The Azure Dragoon and the Lord Commander of the Temple Knights complemented each other as if they were crafted to do so: light, long hair to short dark curls, storm-cloud eyes to those of the clearest sky; they were like characters in those performances, thirty years past, of the traveling players -- the Admiral's Men, from Limsa Lominsa. Oh, how she had enjoyed those plays when she'd been young, still learning in the kitchens at Camp Dragonhead. Near Feast Days, the players would arrive, set up the sparest of platforms in the front courtyard of the camp, and then turn day to night and night to day with nothing but their words and a handful of pretty costumes.

She remembered those sweet, sweet words in patches, pieces, her own thoughts now shaped into them in her head before she'd even made an utterance -- such was the power of well-crafted verse once it had sunk in through the skull. "A Sable Silver'd," that's what she thought now, as she stared at her sweet little lordling and the man for whom he so clearly longed. It was a pretty phrase, pulled from her memories of all those past performances, something to do with the ghost of a dead king and his brooding son, but it so perfectly described the scene set before her -- nearly perfectly at least: her sweet prince was still a gloaming to be gilded, a sable to be silver'd, waiting with his friend for the love story that had yet to be written. Yvonne sighed. She just wanted to see Aymeric happy.

"I'll take it," said the silver-haired man, approaching Yvonne in the doorway and reaching for the burn cream. "I've tended the very worst of his burns." She simply nodded at the face she had only begun to associate with Estinien's name and smiled a little, tugging her husband by his sleeve. "Leave them," she whispered low to the man. "We'll take care of the mess tomorrow, my Lord. Don't fash yerself with it," she announced to the room. Then little, bustling Yvonne pulled her blinking elezen husband out into the hall and shut the door to Aymeric's library firmly behind them.

Aymeric and Estinien simply looked at each other, suddenly awkward now that they were again alone.

"Does it hurt?" Estinien asked, strangely self-conscious as he knelt at Aymeric's feet and looked up at him.

"Hurt?" asked the knight, aware of no sensation other than Estinien below him, his head only ilms away from Aymeric's rapidly hardening cock.

"The burn," replied Estinien, reaching out to smooth ointment over his friend's damaged skin. Aymeric flinched. "It does, then," Estinien smiled, gentling a touch that had already been whisper-light.

"Estinien," said Aymeric, voice tight as he desperately sought to restrain his body's arousal, his rising erection already peeking out the front flap of his shorts. "I...I can do it...there's no need for you..." he stammered. But it was too late. Estinien's eyes widened as he noticed the fat red head of Aymeric's cock reaching out toward him, as if begging for his lips, his touch. To Aymeric's great surprise, the dragoon did not immediately elusive jump backwards out the nearest window. Instead, he swayed were he sat, began to reach, to lean in, lips parting.

Aymeric ejaculated, untouched, his release so forceful it pumped his ejaculate to slick and drip down Estinien's face. He froze, mortified. Estinien simply sat back on his heels, looking perplexed. He slid out his tongue to lick the thick semen from his lips and shrugged at his first taste of ejaculate -- he'd never thought to try his own. Then, with his shirt sleeve, he wiped the rest of his friend's release from his face.

"That was unexpected," he said, looking up at Aymeric, whose head now hung down to his chest, his eyes tightly shut and his cheeks burning redder than his injured leg. "Hey," he said, nudging Aymeric's hand with his own before taking both of the knight's hands in his and using them to leverage himself into a standing position. He lifted Aymeric's chin, straining against the other man's resistance. "Look at me, 'meric," he insisted, turning the name to an endearment. The slightly shorter man opened his eyes and looked up. "It was unexpected, yes, and...sticky. But it's no calamity," Estinien said gently, trying to ease his friend's embarrassment. Then Estinien did something that, to Aymeric, was even more unexpected: he pressed his lips to the young lord's own. He kissed him.

Aymeric's body surged, immediately hard again, his lips trying to turn Estinien's sweet kiss to something scorching.

"Wait," said the silver-haired man, pushing him gently back. "While whatever that _was_ was not unwelcome, it was certainly no deflowering. I want to love you properly, Aymeric, to make love to you, but I'm.... uncertain as to how I might do that yet," he paused, searching. The Lord Commander was the one blessed with a fluent loquacity, after all. "You see..." he started, still stumbling. "In regard to making love, my friend," Estinien paused again, looking straight into Aymeric's turquoise-blue eyes, "it will by _my_ first time as well." 

Aymeric only realized he was still standing, still tethered to the ground, by the fact that his legs started to buckle underneath him, sending him down to meet it. Estinien caught him and eased them both to the settee before the hearth. Then they kissed and whispered, nuzzled and nosed until they fell asleep, exhausted and leaning against one another, Aymeric still bereft of his trousers and Estinien stripped of his helm. Yvonne found them in the morning and tucked down a blanket around what she had begun to think of as her own dearest and prettiest of pairs. She stared, for a moment, at the two heads bowed toward one another, dark hair twined with light, and prayed to the Fury most fervently that her sable-haired lord's long-deferred silvering had finally begun.


	3. Bought the mansion of a love, But not possessed it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Becoming "green-gowned" is an early modern idiom, a bawdy idiom, that describes the state of a maiden's dress when she has returned from time spent outdoors with her beloved swain. It refers specifically to the grass stains on her dress acquired by making love in a meadow and is most often connected to the celebration of Beltane.

"This is silly, Estinien. A maid I may be, but not a cloistered one. I know enough to suffice; I've read books," sighed Aymeric, red-faced and frustrated. In truth, as a boy he'd read a shameful amount of material on the subject of physical love, even the hidden texts in his mother's library, pressed behind those whose outward-facing bindings granted staid respectability to the collection entire. "There were pictures, e'en," he asserted aloud, hoping somehow that his knowledge of said illustrations would convince his friend to ameliorate this torturous waiting.

"Plenty of lovers betrothed but not yet wed have suffered a similar delay. Such an enduring only makes the consummation sweeter," returned the dragoon, now fully armored in his usual drachen mail. They'd been kissing in the Lord Commander's office -- right in the heart of Our Congregation of Knights Most Heavenly -- their mutual arousal heightened by an awareness of this quiet bit of naughtiness, even though Lucia had locked the door behind her when she had left them.

"Your bride I can ne'er be; pray hasten to find that way of loving upon which you seem so determined. Let me be your lover, Estinien," Aymeric pleaded.

"Aye, and leave you panting and green-gowned in some quiet copse of the Dravanian Forelands?" replied Estinien, his voice a sultry smokiness. "I'm afraid not, Blue," he reached to tilt Aymeric's chin before bending in for a kiss. "The pleasure I wish to see wrought upon your skin, upon your trembling, aching flesh, requires a leisure of which we are not currently in possession," the dragoon continued, his voice a whisper now against the lips of his Lord Commander.

Aymeric's entire body shuddered. "For Fury's sake, Estinien..." he began before his mouth was stopped by yet another kiss, urgent enough now that Aymeric had to be wary of slicing himself on that Fury-forsaken axe-head shaped projection jutting out from the very center of the dragoon's chest plate. Loving the Azure Dragoon was not without its hazards. Placing his hands on either side of this particular hazard, he pushed Estinien back and abruptly stood up from his throne-like chair, the unintended consequence of which was that the dragoon, who'd been perched on the arm of that chair -- deprived now of the balancing weight of his fellow -- toppled backwards on the stone floor with a grating, metallic crash and pulled the heavy chair over on top of himself.

"Fury-fucking hells, Aymeric..." he bellowed.

"Estinien!" cried the knight, his eyes widening. "Are you alright?" He rushed over to give his love a hand up, but Estinien was already shaking and shuddering himself, pulling his knees up to his chest and rocking on his back like a flipped admantoise, his wicked rear-facing spikes scratching the flagstones. He was laughing, hysterically even. When offered Aymeric's hand, he hesitated for a moment, still laughing, then pulled the man down with a second great crash of metal plate on stone. One crash might be ignored, but two?

"Lord Commander!" shouted a voice through the heavy door. "Ser Aymeric, are you well?" They heard the jangling of her keys. "What in the world?" exclaimed Lucia as she burst in through the door and observed the Lord Commander of the Temple Knights and Ishgard's dread Azure Dragoon rolling around hysterical on the floor. She smiled. It was rare to see Aymeric in a state other than resigned, clutching weariness, and she'd _never_ seen Estinien's face twisted into an expression other than his customary smirk. Love suited them. "Come now, _boys_ ," she said, mock irritation in her voice. She strode over and reached one hand down to hoist her fully-armored, full-grown Commander from the floor; truly her strength was something to behold. The dragoon she left to himself. "Right yourselves," she hissed, smiling. "The boy and the Chosen arrive soon," she continued, pushing Aymeric's chair to its feet before leaving the office with a thudding slam of the door behind her.

Aymeric sat heavy in his throne, legs sprawling. He watched as Estinien, with a final rock and a quick, hard snap of his abdominals, vaulted from his back straight to his feet. The dragoon approached his Lord Commander. "The boy tarries not overlong in his preparations for this futile effort at parley, it seems," Estinien sighed. "See what I mean? No leisure."

"You're still determined to accompany him, then, to seek out Iceheart?" Aymeric asked, his eyes suddenly tight.

"You're supposed to know nothing of it, remember," Estinien snapped at him. "Your enemies would delight in your possession of even a once-removed association with heretics, Aymeric." Estinien sighed before he continued: "Besides, Hydalyn's Chosen will be there as well. She's formidable. She'll keep us safe." He reached out to stroke Aymeric's cheek with his thumb, trying to placate him.

"What _is_ she, do you think, Estinien?" asked the knight, his brow creasing as he thought of her, massive, with onyx-black skin and hair as white as Estinien's... and then there were the ridged, black horns, curling up not from a helm of drachen mail, but from the woman's own skull.

"Not draconic, I think, despite the appendages," replied Estinien thoughtfully, gesturing with one gauntleted hand to the horns on his own helm. "I think a draconic aether would be resonant with my own. No," he shook his head, "she's not been dragon-blooded. I think it's something else."

"Haurchefant is lost," Aymeric said, relaxing for a moment and smiling. "I think he may mean to make hers the final name on his long list of lovers."

"Ha!" Estinien snorted. "Well, it's a pretty name, at least: Bloom Rising. Hellsguard, I think?"

"Mixed marriage, actually," returned Aymeric. "According to our sources, her sire is a Sea Wolf. Mother's the guard, I think."

"Huh, wonder where the horns come in, then" replied Estinien thoughtfully,

"Not to mention those blood-red talons on the tips of her fingers," returned his lord. "They must be ilms long." Both men looked at each other and laughed. "I'd hate to see the state of poor Haurchefant's back right now," continued the Lord Commander.

"He must be nigh-on flayed," huffed the dragoon.

"And he probably likes it, knowing him. At least the other of Ishgard's most eligible bastards enjoys himself," Aymeric sighed.

Estinien moved then, from the spot where he'd been leaning on the heavy desk, not wishing to chance the arm of the chair again, and gingerly settled himself into his Lord Commander's armored lap. He pulled in his long limbs and curled into the other man, a comfort-seeking creature wishing to feed on Aymeric's warmth. Drawing off his helm, he set it on the ground before wrapping his arms around his lord's neck and kissing him deeply. "Let me find my way to love you, 'meric. It won't be too long now, I don't think. Once purged of my hatred for the Dravanians, for Nidhogg, I plan on filling myself with you, my love for you, or perhaps...just you," he said with an insinuating smirk. "Though I suppose you might prefer it the other way round, filled instead of filling."

"Estinien!" Aymeric rebuked him, his cheeks reddening as he visibly shuddered. The young lord composed himself before responding. "I'd wait, if necessary, from this day forth until the ending of the world," he said, reddening further with slight embarrassment at his own histrionics.

"I go into the wilderness, then, to seek what will spare us precisely that unnecessary ending," replied his lover in all but the act.


	4. O, List!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The notes thing doesn't seem to want to work for me. I do apologize; technology has ever been my bane. Hamlet, however, is one of my true delights. He gets a bad rep, poor brooding prince that he is, his play the very best example of the bloody revenge tragedy, the platonic ideal of the genre, really. And what a popular genre it was on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, though it did, as Estinien mentions, have period stage managers pulling out their hair over what to do so that those actors remaining upright during the last speeches of the play could manage to avoid tripping over all the bodies. 
> 
> Hamlet is a prince, at the pinnacle of Danish society, so he never has to worry, as Aymeric does, about how intent slips in the play of "words, deeds and beliefs." Aymeric knows "seems," knows that people can "seem" to be something that they very much are not. The first four acts of Hamlet are all about the prince, after having every pillar of his belief system yanked out from under him, learning how to negotiate "seems." By the fifth act, however, he's done. He resigns himself to meet his fate. "The readiness is all," he says, a sentiment with which I think Estinien can agree on the eve of his own revenge.

"I feel like I'm slipping, like my edge grows dull, Aymeric. In no tale of which I've heard, does the revenger allow himself to be distracted by softer things," Estinien said, nuzzling his face into the other man's soft, sable hair. They were in Aymeric's bed, the dragoon having crept in through his second-story window, setting aside lance and armor to climb underneath layers of soft wool and stacked feather beds. This was dangerous, he knew, only his lord's long night shirt and his own woolen under-things separating their still-yearning bodies. Tonight, however, Aymeric neither needled nor prodded: his pulled-taut voice was hushed.

"Well there is that one about the prince, the play, that is. By the end, he's not distracted, per se, but neither is he burning. He's simply ready, finally, to meet his fate: no hesitation, no plaguing doubt. 'The readiness is all,'" quoted the dark-haired man, hoping to distract his love to sleep. Estinien needed his rest, Aymeric knew. Like the prince his lord referenced, the Azure Dragoon drew close to the fate upon which he was founded: Estinien faced Nidhogg on the morrow.

"He still ends up dead, as I recall, as does most of the court. Revenge always clutters the stage with bodies," Estinien retorted. "Yet, I feel like I betray them thinking thus."

"Oh, my love," whispered Aymeric, his eyes soft with sympathy as a reached up a hand to stroke Estinien's silver-stubbled cheek. Into the wilderness, he had carried no razor other than the one that was perpetually slicing through his heart.

"My mother used to spin, Aymeric, with the wool from our own sheep, of course. She'd spin and then she'd knit -- fancy aran tunics with all the plaits and ridges that thicken the garment, lend it warmth and protection. She'd knit and she'd spin, hands always whirring or clicking, for my brother, for my father, for me," Estinien's voice grew dark and distant. "Everything burned, Aymeric, everything she'd ever made us -- the spinning wheel too -- everything except for the tunic I wore when Alberic plucked me from the ruins. He's kept it for me, in a chest all these years. It still smells like Fury-fucked sulphur."

Aymeric simply wrapped himself tighter around his dragoon, hoping to clutch comfort into him, press love and warmth through his skin. He kissed him softly. Estinien surprised him, then, by pushing hard and hot into the kiss, sucking the startled knight's tongue into his mouth and vaulting on top of him to straddle his hips. He had pulled Aymeric's nightshirt over his head, leaving the young lord stripped buck bare beneath him, and was halfway out of his own shirt, when Aymeric lightly pressed both palms against his chest. Estinien looked down upon his love, whose eyes had widened with uncertainty.

"I don't mind, my love" said Aymeric sweetly. "I want you, always, as my body makes evident," he continued, gesturing toward his own cock, already red and rigid. "But I did not think _you_ wanted it like this -- not for our first time, at least."

Estinien pulled back then. Loving Aymeric should never be a mere distraction. Ashamed, he slid from atop his hips to rest his head on his beloved's bare shoulder, not managing, however, to stop himself from violently buffeting the other man's body with his own sudden, silent, full-body sobbing. Aymeric simply held him. After a brief time, the shaking stopped.

"She's pregnant, you know," Estinien said, hearing his own voice shamefully break a confidence.

"Bloom is? I know," replied Aymeric. "Haurchefant's in pieces about it, desperate for them to marry -- doesn't want the child to be born a bastard. Can't think why," he said wryly. "If she's gone to him tonight, as you've come to me, I wouldn't be surprised to see her finger encircled by a Fortemps-crested ring on the morrow."

"She's pregnant," Estinien repeated, not to be deterred, "and yet we throw her at four-armed Vilekin Gods, make her commit to the Dravanians' tests. And now I take her to Nidhogg." Estinien sighed again; then he huffed out a somewhat bemused sound from deep in his throat. "That was quite the display, by the way, today in The Congregation."

"I meant it, Estinien. I long to face Nidhogg at your side, to lend you my sword, keep you safe behind my shield," Aymeric replied, suddenly fierce.

"We've already discussed why that cannot be. You're needed here. If we should fail..."

"Then Nidhogg beware," interrupted Aymeric, "for I shall invite the Fury Herself to occupy my flesh, as Iceheart did Shiva -- I shall raise a Goddess to my grief and She _will_ defeat him though She make every soul in Ishgard her thrall." 

"Aymeric..." the dragoon whispered, "you don't mean that. See what loving me does? It pollutes even a soul as pure as yours with the filth of my desperate, unending ire."

"Nay, 'tis the thought of losing, not loving, that turns me savage," the man rejoined, "and the waiting, far removed from where I can be of any use to you. Oh, the waiting..." Aymeric sighed out, clearly in agony.

"The waiting..." Estinien echoed. "Alas, that seems the theme of our love," he admitted ruefully. "But perhaps Nidhogg, the focus of my hate is, ironically, the key to unlocking the way I wish to love thee," the dragoon continued, thoughtfully. "I could give you my body without thought, as I've given it to countless others, but my heart...my heart..." Estinien paused. "I cannot devote it to you, 'meric, when it's so much given over to my hatred of the beast. My loving you cannot be a thing cleaved in 'twain; I must give you all of me, my body and heart rejoined."

"Oh, 'stinien, Estinien, my love," Aymeric softly moaned, overwhelmed by the admission, by the threat waiting on the morrow, by his own stoked arousal, building quickly to the point that he thought he might embarrass himself yet again by ejaculating untouched against the other man. He took a couple of deep breaths and thought of the Congregation, the parchment piled on his desk, ilms deep -- the requests, requisitions, receipts. It calmed him, pulled him back from the brink. "As I've said before, I would wait for thee until the ending of the world. Just..." and here he hesitated for a beat, the dragoon's face made blurry by tears he could do nothing to repress, "just do your best, my love, to make certain that end comes not on the morrow, the end of _my_ world at least. Come back to me, Estinien."

"Fury-granting, my lord, I will have my victory... and my revenge. But know this, Aymeric," he said, dark eyes burning, "If I am, by chance, defeated, my love for you can do naught but endure. I would haunt Halone's Halls for a hundred years, watching and waiting and longing for your arrival, my precious, precious Blue Angel!"


	5. My poor fool: a blazon.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Blazon is a type of poem, very popular during the renaissance, in which one catalogues the parts, usually body parts or significant features, of one's beloved.
> 
> The St. Crispin's Day Speech is from Henry the Fifth, the last play in Shakespeare's second History Tetralogy, often referred to as the Henriad. Man, I love the freaking Henriad. Set right before the Battle of Agincourt, King Henry must rally his vastly outnumbered troops. He does so, thusly:"...and Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,/ From this day until the ending of the world,/ But we in it shall be remembered --/ We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/ For he today who sheds his blood with me/ Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile/This day shall gentle his condition " (4.3.57-63). Man, that's a great speech. Aymeric was kind of born to deliver St. Crispin Day Speeches; he probably has. That he can manage it in the condition in which he finds himself here is a testament to his fortitude.
> 
> There's no actual depiction of rape here, but there is a description of the injuries caused by it.

His hands... long fingers steepling, stroking, plying his ceaselessly skritching quill. Thrust! Turn to disembowel! Dive to drive Gae Bolg through two bodies at once, skewering. Lucia at his left, Haurchefant, his right, guarding as he wrenches the lance free and continues forward.

His tongue...perhaps tongue and hands both, like the sweet lady from that savage tale, deprived of hands and tongue so she couldn't reveal her ravagers. The tongue would be hard for Aymeric, by the Fury it would! It didn't matter; he would love him enough to become his voice, tame his own tongue to Aymeric's dulcet murmurings, submitting himself to verbally seduce those necessary to his lord's vision of a better Ishgard. Thrust, again! And again, with vorpal intensity! Lucia to his left, taunting those remaining. Haurchefant, at his right, bashing his shield to knock four to the floor, ripe to be pinned between sword and lance. They move forward.

His balls... like Abelard the monk. It didn't matter. He would cut off his own in sympathy, cloister himself like the Lady Eloise and still love Aymeric. Dive to shatter! Descend to disembowel! Lucia slicing through the left. Haurchefant ploughing through the right. Now, they move forward and down... down, down, down.

His eyes...oh, not his eyes! Please, Halone, not his eyes! He was the bastard himself, not the father of that sharper-toothed serpent who visited his bastard rage upon his sire. He swallowed. It didn't matter. He would bequeath to him his own duller, darker eyes, hoping they didn't draw down shade upon his ever-bright vision. And he would love Aymeric still, even with shadows for eyes. Close now. Thrust to the center! What was that thrice-damned woman doing? Throwing down her circlet, sweeping back her fringe to reveal herself. It provoked them, the last group at the door. He felt Haurchefant strip himself from his right flank to bolster the First Commander. He felt naked.

"Fly to him, Estinien!" Haurchefant shouted. "Free Aymeric!"

His body moved, but his heart froze. None of it mattered, none of the pieces they may have sliced or sawed or gouged from him. If he only still breathed, that would be enough. Oh, Halone, Mother Fury, whose hallowed halls I seek for mine end..., oh, please, please, let him still breathe! Please, please.... please, please, please! I beg of Thee his breath! He moved forward, split the lock, crashed through the door. The smell! Oh no, no, NO! Vomit, blood and death! And Aymeric, his precious Blue, face-down and spread-eagled on a table like a stone altar to a sickening god, shackles on his ankles and wrists! But did he breathe? He held his own, whole body shaking, desperate to see a fall and rise. There! He saw it! Heard a rasping wheeze. His lover drew breath and that was enough.

"Aymeric!" he let out an agonized groan. The shackled body flinched, jolting against its chains.

"Aymeric, my Blue, my precious, precious angel," Estinien cooed, forcing his own voice to drop low and soothing even as bile rose up from his stomach. He padded on his softest feet toward the distressed man, now rattling his chains as though fighting something invisible. That was when he smelled it, a scent that added musk to the putridity. Estinien went to howl, but only vomit came up, adding to the filth coating the floor. He leaned on the table, gasping, Aymeric still struggling against the presence he felt beside him.

One couldn't even call it a ravaging, Estinien thought, steeling himself to a necessary numbness. Aymeric had been savaged, his perineum torn like a mother who'd endured a difficult birthing, ripped ragged and bleeding half-way to his scrotum, which Estinien noted, did at least remain attached to his body. Instead, they had taken something else.

"Aymeric, open your eyes, my love," he said, his voice a whisper now, as he removed his right gauntlet and reached out to stroke a gentle hand through his lord's blood-matted hair. Of course, he flinched away again, but Estinien endured it this time, never ceasing his coaxing ministrations. Aymeric went suddenly still. He turned his head and slit open his eyes.

"'stinien?" he asked, in a frightened, high-pitched child's voice, simultaneously opening his eyes wide in wonder. Thus it was confirmed that he remained in possession of both, both eyes and tongue.

"Oh, Fury's bounty!" Estinien couldn't help himself from exhaling softly. He saw the ring of keys, then, kept surprisingly close to the prisoner, to tantalize perhaps with the rotten dream of escape. Taking it, he tried two before the shackle on Aymeric's right wrist sprung loose. Quickly, he freed him from the others. "Can you move, my love?" he asked, trying with the very gentlest grip of which he was capable to ease him onto his side so he could assess any damage to the front of the Lord Commander's body.

Estinien went volcanic. Around the thick base of Aymeric's penis, a leather cord was knotted, loose now that he was completely soft. So they had subjected his Blue, his sweet, sweet, innocent love, to a shame-inducing wanting -- one they would not allow to be satisfied e'en -- before they had raped him.

"Don't look at me, Estinien!" Aymeric begged, trying to fumble with his blood-starved hands to remove the ring of leather from his cock.

When did Estinien ever listen to anyone? He crouched down to align himself with Aymeric's blessedly still-intact eyes and looked deep. "How can I not look at that which is the only thing in my life worth seeing -- you breathing, complete, all parts still attached?" he asked, holding his lord's attention as he, himself, nimbly removed the leather ring and cast it to the floor. The dragoon rose, then, and looked around the room, wondering what they'd done with Aymeric's armor.

"Lord Commander!" Lucia yelled, throwing open the door to the dungeon. Estinien could see Haurchefant at her back, facing his shield still toward the hallway behind them, guarding. Aymeric shuffled again on the table, trying to cover himself, but there was no need. The Lady Commander, with circlet and fringe back in place, kept her gaze locked on Estinien's as she pulled something from where it was secreted in her greave and handed it to the dragoon. "Help him to drink this," she said, and then turned to continue the search for her lord's distinctive armor. Haurchefant still had his back to them, still guarding the lock-shattered door.

A healing potion! Fury bless the Radiant, he thought to himself as he un-stoppered the distinctive glass bottle and turned to brace an arm around the back of Aymeric's shoulders, supporting him as he helped him consume the draught. It must have been a powerful one, Estinien thought, because the effect was nigh immediate. Aymeric was strong enough to draw his long limbs into his body, still lying curled on his side, and to take several deep breaths free from the weezing indicative of battered, cracked ribs. His nethers would need stitching, of course, to prevent a thick, jagged scarring, but the chirurgeons could attend to it. Plenty of mothers newly-made endured similar, Estinien reminded himself, and they healed, went on even to bring additional babes into the world, forgetting former pain at the prospect of new love. Mothers...Estinien thought to himself, the word nagging him to remember something important.

"Bloom!" cried Aymeric, even broken as he was still in happy sympathy with Estinien's own straining thoughts. "Haurchefant, where is your wife?" he asked, pushing himself up to sit heavily on his right hip. It was then that the image came to Estinien, the massive roe dwarfed by a looming Nidhogg, robe split up the side to reveal she was much further along in her pregnancy than she'd allowed him to believe -- still powerful, of course, the essence of puissance really, but an essence just on the edge of being diluted by a clumsiness native to pregnancy's loosening ligaments. She'd made a misstep or two fighting the Great Wyrm -- that they had still prevailed spoke to her power of course, but the missteps had been there.

"You must go to her, Haurchefant. We..." Estinien started.

"...must go to her," interrupted Aymeric, his Lord Commander voice somehow suddenly in place. "We cannot allow Bloom to continue alone against the Ward, against...my father," he continued, his voice catching just a bit on the last word.

"Aye," Estinien agreed, his hands mechanically drawn to buckling his beloved lord in the reclaimed armor Lucia had ferreted from a corner of the dungeon room. The Lady Knight helped, somehow managing to ease Aymeric into his customary splendour while neither looking directly at his naked body, nor exchanging her cool, impassive look for one imbued with a pity that might enhance his shame. 

"My wife is strong," said Haurchefant, shield held high, still guarding the door.

"And we can only bolster her strength with our presence," replied Aymeric, fully dressed now and staggering to his feet supported between Estinien and Lucia. "With sword and lance and your own proud and indomitable shield to serve her, Lord Haurchefant, she can do naught but prevail." Not quite a St. Crispin's Day speech, Estinien thought, but certainly the "little touch of 'meric in the night" that heartened those who heard it, an impressive rallying from a man who had just barely come through the darkest night he was ever like to know. Would it were day... for them all.

Regardless, Aymeric's steeliness inspired the dragoon to push the group forward, out the broken door, Haurchefant in front, Aymeric still shoved between himself and Lucia, and up, up, up those endless stairs to seek out Hydalyn's Chosen.


	6. This Too, Too Solid Flesh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The title here refers to the first line of the first soliloquy in Hamlet. There are actually four of them in Hamlet, the Big Daddy of them all--"To be or not to be"--coming in at #3. The first however, particularly this first line of the first, is a center of debate in Shakespearean scholarship, mostly because of the peculiar conditions surrounding the publication of plays during the English Renaissance. Shakespeare's works were popular culture back then, not held in the regard they are now until the Romantic period; his plays sold well. Thus, publishers employed all sorts of sneaky methods to steal them. They bribed actors for their scripts so frequently that eventually the players were only given their own parts and their cues, and, of course, even without mobiles, some audience members were there to record the stage as best they could. As a result of all this, when Ben Jonson and Co. got around to trying to publish Shakespeare's collected works in 1623, what we call the First Folio, there were four different versions of Hamlet from which to choose. To this day, some editions of the collected works use "solid," from the folio, and some use "sullied," from another version. Estinien comes down firmly in the first camp.

Later, so much later, when so much had been lost and both the newly-widowed Warrior of Light and his own dear Lord Commander had both succumbed to the dreamless sleep of the conjurers' endlessly recast repose -- for him so that they might repair his most sensitive of injuries and, for her, so that her grief might not force an imprudently early delivery of her now-even-more precious babe -- Estinien had a moment to himself. He was not his own best company. Assured, finally, that Aymeric was resting, repaired, in recovery, he fled, vaulting toward his hidey-hole atop Halone's House, so far above the crushing events of recent hours. His balls were dried up now, shriveled, perhaps for good, he thought; he had neither the will nor capacity to leave his customary offering, spilling vomit and tears on the spires instead.

And he had been _so near_ bliss. He felt guilty now to think of what he had lost, considering he remained in possession of an Aymeric still breathing, but he couldn't help himself; they had been such near things, both his possession of his love and the subsequent near loss of him.

Only days earlier, though it felt like years now, he had returned triumphant: Nidhogg was slain. He hadn't been happy for it -- nay, he had learned too many truths, about his people and himself, to fully inhabit a happy state. But he was free....and strangely empty, as he'd predicted. Estinien had helped quell the odd denouement of heretic riots when he arrived back in Ishgard proper, made arrangements with his allies to meet later in the evening to confer, and then taken a deep breath and resolved to start filling up this strange, fresh emptiness with as much of Aymeric as possible. But first he must bathe.

He retreated to the barracks, scrubbing the blood from his own pale skin and soaping dried clots from his silver hair, letting it dry loose around his shoulders when he finished. There were no flower carts rolling 'round Ishgard, no cheerful garden markets that could brave such cold, but there were shops that sold hothouse blooms, and to one in particular, Estinien was known. He bought roses, white ones, enough to deck a bridal bower -- for that was what he intended to make for Aymeric and himself in the bells before they were both engaged to meet at the Fortemps manor.

For now, Estinien headed towards House de Borel, letting himself in through the kitchen door, where he nodded to Yvonne and they proceeded with their preparations. Candles were fetched and lit, roses arranged and set about the bedroom. Estinien was pulled down to that same ample bosom where young Aymeric's face had so often pillowed; tears were shed upon his crown and he was kissed a half-dozen times upon his brow before, with a final teary glance back at the dragoon, the woman slipped out to the Congregation, left a brief but urgent missive for her lord with the First Commander, and collected her husband for a week-long visit to their married daughter in the North Shroud.

Estinien undressed. He anointed himself with a perfume oil scented with the essence of geraniums and made certain the fire was stoked high in the chamber's hearth. Placing that same oil within reach of the bed, he turned back the top-most of Aymeric's stacked feather beds and slid between linens softened by use. Then he waited, sitting propped against pillows directly in the center of the bed, the smooth skin of his bare chest made pearlescent in the candle-glow and his hair fanned out around his back and shoulders like a glimmering silver veil. He didn't wait long.

"Estinien!" Aymeric said, bursting into the room with one pauldron already unclasped and held under his arm and both hands working at the clasps of its twin. He stopped short, mouth open. "Estinien...," he whispered now, the wonder in his tone betraying his awe. "It's beautiful, Estinien," Aymeric continued, the candlelight suddenly gone bleary as his emotions welled up into his eyes. " _You're_ beautiful, Estinien. Sitting there... _shimmering_ like that, you...you teach these very _candles_ to burn bright," he choked out, voice tight. "I had said I could ne'er be your bride, having no idea that you might yet be mine."

"We can both be brides, Aymeric, and bridegrooms both, too," answered the dragoon. "The Fury to which I submit myself admits no impediments to a marriage of true minds regardless of the bodies to which those minds are attached."

"Estinien..." Aymeric trailed off, stunned by the other man's eloquence. "You've been concealing the silver of your tongue as well as you hide those like-coloured strands 'neath your helm. Are you..." he swallowed, considering, trying to shape his mouth into the coy, teasing smirk which belied how seriously he considered his next question: "Are you asking me to marry you, Estinien?"

The man in his bed furrowed his brows, ruminating as he looked down at his own scarred and roughened hands clasped in front of him atop the feather bed. Could he offer such hands to his lord? Abruptly, he jerked up his chin to look fearlessly into Aymeric's peerless eyes. "Aye," he said, giving a sharp nod. "I would consider the ritual upon which we embark the consummation of such a union, binding you to me until my last breath," he said, pausing then to impart into his next words the sudden frenzied feeling building in his chest. "But if you let me claim you, Aymeric, you will be _mine_ ," Estinien nearly snarled out. "Think on it, if you wish, Blue," he continued, sighing out his intensity slowly. "As for me, I'm already lost to your possession; I'm yours."

"And _I've_ been yours ere I knew I could be claimed," Aymeric cried out fiercely, drawing to himself some of the intensity his partner had relinquished. He climbed onto the bed, still struggling to remove his cloak, caught the edge of the Fury-damned thing under his still armored knee and sprawled forward across Estinien's lap. "I could ne'er learn to retain my grace around you if I were gifted with the tutelage of a troupe of dancing masters," he muttered sheepishly. They both laughed, and that was good, helped to dissipate some of the tension associated with their mutual fervor. "Help me," Aymeric pleaded, and Estinien immediately set about fiddling with the many clasps and ties that kept his lord encased in the elaborate armor.

"I have no trouble believing, now, that it once took the ministrations of two squires and the passing of at least the like number of bells to similarly equip a knight," Estinien commented, fumbling with the latch on Aymeric's left greave.

"Thank the Fury for advancements in the armorers' science," the other man agreed, "and, of course, Stephanivian Hallianarte's engineers." He scooped his own calf from the opposite greave and leaned back on the bed to start on his thigh guards.

Some minutes later, when Aymeric was finally stripped to his skin and had joined Estinien naked under the duvet, both men were so befuddled from the exertions required to remove the Lord Commander's armor that they just rolled to face each other and stared. Then each of them, suddenly, realized what exactly he was _seeing_. Estinien reached out with a trembling hand; Aymeric shivered at a touch yet unfelt. The dragoon set his long fingers ever-so-lightly on Aymeric's chest, directly above his heart, drawing out the beat with his roughened fingertips. His knight snaked an arm around his waist to pull them closer together, inadvertently sliding their equally-rigid cocks against one another. As though the Lord of Levin himself had descended directly into Aymeric's chambers to upbraid them for some perceived impudence, both men jolted and cried out. The current now initiated, flowing to animate their limbs, buzz through their blood, neither man could for one moment longer keep his hands and mouth from the other's skin. With nigh bacchanalian frenzy, they tore into each other, all grasping limbs and lips.

Estinien flipped the feather bed off of them -- he was overheated as it was and the heavy thing was beginning to impede their mutual exploration -- and pushed Aymeric flat on his back. He crouched at his lord's side, lifting Aymeric's leg to place a breathy kiss at the back of his knee. Continuing downwards, he placed another on the back of his thigh. Aymeric twitched. "Ticklish?" asked Estinien, grinning, before shuffling forward and lowering the other man's leg around him so that the dragoon was now positioned directly between Aymeric's knees. He spied the billowing pillow of Aymeric's scrotum and nigh collapsed into it, burying his face and breathing deep. "You smell so... _good_ , Aymeric, like baked goods hot from the oven, something with almonds, and sweet," he murmured, continuing to nuzzle the other man's testes. "And your sack is _huge_. No wonder you sit like that."

"Sit like what?" Aymeric absently asked, head tossed back and breathing hard with his building arousal.

"You know, sprawling, legs spread wide. Fury's sake, Aymeric, two courtesans could comfortably pleasure you, shoulder to shoulder, in the gap you leave between your thighs," Estinien retorted, only slightly exaggerating as he continued to bury his nose in Aymeric's scrotum.

"Huh, I never realized," the sable-haired man replied, softly "I suppose I do require some... room to maintain my comfort. Wait," he continued, his lips now spreading into an impish grin, "let me see yours." Estinien nodded as he allowed himself to be drawn up over Aymeric's body and then gently tipped and rolled onto his back.

"The testes themselves are equal in size to your own, I think; I've always had oversized balls, as many a former captain of mine can attest," Estinien smirked, "but the sack, well, while out-sizing many of the like, is no match for yours."

"Maybe not in size, but in perfection," Aymeric rejoined placing his own body now between the outspread thighs of his partner. "Every part of you seems the perfect match to mine own, dearest," he continued, dropping his own face down to nose Estinien, while remaining highly cognizant of how close he drew to the dragoon's own lance, smooth and tinted like a pale, pink rose, twitching perpendicular to Estinien's stomach as it began to weep in earnest. Aymeric had only to stretch out his tongue, to swipe the flat of it up that long underside...wait, he did scent something. The lord buried his nose in his beloved's testicles, breathing deeply. "You're right, love; they do smell good, like almonds and something baking, just like you said." He sniffed again. "There's something else too...like spice, something burning hot."

"Mayhap it's the dragon's blood," said Estinien absently, his arousal making him forget he had yet to burden his beloved with Hraesvelgr's spilled truths, had yet to be officially debriefed.

"What?" said Aymeric carefully, but the dragoon could already feel his mistake in the swiftly drawn intake of the Lord Commander's breath, in the tightening of the body crouched between his own spread thighs.

"'Tis nothing, 'meric; it can wait," Estinien said, perhaps a bit too quickly, before pushing himself to sit up and trying to urge Aymeric into a kiss. His lord acquiesced for the moment, bracing his hands against the dragoon's shoulders and leaning into his kiss, but Estinien could feel his sudden stiffness, could sense his restraint.

"So what the heretics say...it's true, then?" Aymeric asked, pulling slightly from Estinien's embrace and looking him straight in the eyes. "You must tell me the truth, Estinien," he pleaded softly now, eyes filling with tears. "I cannot bear to commit myself to this...pleasure," he started and stopped, closing his eyes slowly and breathing deep to try and regain control over his still-raging desire. "I cannot continue with this...," he gestured to include their still pressed-together bodies in the sweep of his hand, "this consummation of what we both attest to be our own Most Holy Union before Halone herself -- I cannot allow myself this bliss -- while remaining uncertain as to whether or not I share the blood of one who would willfully conceal a most horrendous truth."

Estinien held Aymeric's gaze, pressed his face into such impassivity as he could muster, and whispered, "It's true. 'Tis all true."

"No!" Aymeric groaned, in seeming agony, as he dropped his face into his hands. "So much, Estinien! So much have we lost -- do we still lose -- day by day by day!" he lamented before collapsing into the dragoon's waiting arms and beginning to sob. Estinien held tight.

"Aymeric, my love," the silver-haired man murmured into his knight's soft hair, trying to calm him, but the Lord Commander of the Temple Knights -- the man who reviewed the daily reports, who wrote a letter to the bereaved family of each and every knight lost under his command, who, on his own two feet, led each charge when the enemy succeeded in breaching Ishgard's walls, and who, later, would sign the forms that requisitioned yet more holy cedar for yet more coffins -- that man, for all of which he was capable, was beyond consolation. Estinien kissed him on the crown of his head and then gently withdrew his arms from around his still-sobbing love and stepped, still naked, from the bed.

"Where are you going, Estinien?" Aymeric stuttered out in uneven huffs of breath, his diaphragm still trembling with sobs, as the dragoon proceeded toward the nearest candelabra and started to snuff out the flames with both licked fingers and blown breath.

"Wouldn't want Borel Manor to burn while you're out confronting your father," he replied, continuing his darkening of the room. Aymeric sat up, trying hard to steady himself.

"We will have this, Estinien. I promise you!" he exhorted. "But I cannot accept what has been the utmost desire of my heart for so much longer than you know, when so many others have been deprived not just of their desires but of their very hearts' beatings by a lie..." he paused here for a moment, overcome. Then, regaining his composure, he continued in a lower, harder voice, projecting the inexorability of his will to truth, "a lie, Estinien, that may have been knowingly sanctioned and vigorously defended by my own blood."

Finished with the candles, Estinien drew a single long-stemmed white rose from one of the vases he and Yvonne had placed around the room earlier, and stepped back toward the bed. Looking down at Aymeric, making certain he held the other man's gaze, he touched his lips to the full, fragrant blossom, placed it upon his lord's forehead and drew the soft petals down upon his lord's perfect mouth. Aymeric shut his eyes, accepting the thorn-sheared stem from his one true love, and held the rose to his own lips for several long moments. He stood up, accepting Estinien's hands this time, and, with trembling fingers -- both of them still mostly hard and aching and _wanting_ \-- they had buckled and strapped and tied each other back into their armor. Estinien kissed Aymeric, soft and deep, before tying back his hair and settling his damaged helm over his face. Then they had left for Fortemps Manor. 

And Aymeric had resolved before the protesting cabal of his closest friends to immediately address the Archbishop, to acquaint His Holiness with these truths newly revealed. As thanks for his efforts, he'd been promptly accused of heresy and committed to the tender mercies of an Ishgardian inquisition conducted by the Heaven's Ward themselves, who, fattened upon some sort of dark aether, had grown in power to nigh primal strength. Zephirin -- Estinien would no longer grant him the "Ser" regardless of what sort of god now inhabited his body -- had blasted a fist-sized hole through Lord Haurchefant and his indomitable Fortemps shield both and Aymeric had been tortured and torn apart by monsters; he'd been literally god-fucked. What kind of love would now be required to draw Aymeric back within the circle of his arms? Was Estinien even capable of making such a love out of his own blood and flesh?

Perched yet among those lovely reaching spires that belied the depravity of the dungeon bowels upon which they were erected, Estinien surmised that even his own long-cultivated rage, fanned back to full fury, would not be equal to the ire merited by Thordan and his Knights Twelve, both past and present. Halone herself was required for such a reckoning. 

But it was too early for that now, to think on restitution, on justice. That Bloom Rising would seek it in Halone's stead, he had no doubt, once she was safely delivered of the life her own lost lord had sown within her womb. Estinien would be at her side then, to avenge his own love's loss as well, but he'd be Fury-damned if he'd allow it before that babe was safely in the arms of Edmont de Fortemps. He'd sit on the woman if he must. Better she remain slumbering for a little while yet.

Aymeric, however, would soon wake, would soon be allowed home, where he could ostensibly rest "more comfortably." To this comfort, Estinien must hastily attend. Yvonne and Gerard had yet to return from the shroud and Estinien had not the stomach to call them back early; the sweet lady's heart would break soon enough for her beloved little lordling.

********************* 

Aymeric refused his arm, as expected, when they strode through the small distance separating the infirmary from Borel Manor. With all the rumours flooding through Ishgard in the wake of the Archbishop's and the Ward's departure, the Lord Commander of the Temple Knights could afford to appear as nothing but the bulwark his office represented. He must manifest strength in the streets.

Captain Abel himself had seen to Aymeric's most gruesome wounding, stitching him up as he slept; they had nothing to fear from that quarter. As much of a thorn in the side as both of them had been to the gentle healer over the years, both steadfastly refusing to fully recover from injuries before returning to duty, the man would never betray their confidence. He was loyal to Aymeric.

So it was really all theater, this slow and stately strutting through the streets as though he were completely at ease with the world around him. Aymeric was a master at seeming; unlike that other sweet prince, his lord _knew_ seems. Had he so chosen, he could have smiled and smiled and yet been the villain with an oh-so-potent-poison poised at pointed ear. Fortunately for everyone concerned, despite his keen awareness of they ways in which intent could slip in the shifting play of "words, deeds and beliefs," the Lord Commander had chosen be the hero in Ishgard's story... in his own story too, Estinien thought. Aymeric was assuredly his hero, his angel, nay, the very god of his idolatry.

He was also the dragoon's most sacred charge at the moment. While the contingent of guards a Lord Commander certainly required in streets primed for civil unrest would have called attention to both Aymeric's own and his command's weakness -- inviting that very unrest perhaps -- his oldest friend walking by his side signaled nothing. The Azure Dragoon sauntering through the streets of Ishgard with the Lord Commander of the Temple Knights at his side had been a common sight for years, after all. And though Estinien was but one guardian, there could be none better for Aymeric. Already unmatched in his martial prowess, his defense of his broken mate would be dazzling in its barbarism. 

To no one's surprise, they reached the manor's door without interruption. Aymeric even maintained his composure through the foyer, his steps yet unfaltering, still attuned to the rhythm of his stately parade through the streets. It was when Estinien started to nudge him in the direction of his own chambers that he collapsed on the stairs. "I can't, Estinien. I just can't...not where we..." he choked out, trailing off.

""Tis fine, 'meric," cooed the dragoon in a low, calm voice, almost lilting, musical. "I set everything aright in your rooms before you woke, back to the norm. There should be no hint..."

"Of our happiness, you mean?" groaned his lord, "of _my_ first true happiness? Is that what should be _righted_ into oblivion?" He hugged himself close against the rising marble columns of the staircase, eyes screwed tight enough to blot out a world grown too cruel even for his own hopeful endurance. Flinching once, twice, three times at Estinien's gently coaxing touch to his shoulder, trying to urge his lord from the stairs, Aymeric was perhaps too overwhelmed to react when the dragoon simply scooped him into his arms entire and carried him toward his late mother's suite of rooms. "I was so happy, Estinien...so _happy_...so very, very happy," he continued murmuring as he let his body sag in the other man's arms.

"And you will be again. We will be, Aymeric. My love for you remains unaltered," replied Estinien, pained himself by the remembrance of what they'd so recently shared. He felt Aymeric suddenly stiffen in his arms and was somewhat shocked, looking down, to see his face turned crimson and livid.

"And what of your desire, Estinien? What of your _wanting_... has that remained unaltered as well," Aymeric said in almost a bitter mocking tone, something the dragoon had never before heard from him.

"Your injuries, Aymeric," said Estinien, confused, "surely you must heal before..."

"Before what? Before you can even begin to swallow down your rising gorge at the thought of touching my too, too sullied flesh?" his lord almost spat at him.

"What?" rejoined the dragoon, his own carefully hidden anguish at their shared loss betrayed in the sudden rawness of his voice. Something pricked at him suddenly, if not at his thumbs, certainly at his heart; Estinien felt the approach of _something wicked_ within him. He immediately contracted into stone, his body, his features, his voice. "It's solid, Aymeric, not sullied," Estinien replied impassively, finally reaching the chambers he sought, entering and committing his lord to the cold comfort of an empty bed. "As in," he continued now, looking down at the other man and busying himself by removing Aymeric's long leather dress boots, "your flesh is yet solid, present, not in pieces or blasted through with holes or burnt into dust."

"I _saved_ myself for you!" Aymeric nigh screamed at him, his beautiful features contorted into a grimace of rage as he propped himself on his elbows to better accuse Estinien. "You wished to find your own Fury-blasted way to love me, to _make_ love to me," he continued, wriggling now out of his fine dress trousers and his soft silken shorts, pushing them past his knees and kicking out of them completely to violently thrust his legs apart. "Make love to this, Estinien!" he sneered, baring himself to the other man's gaze.

His skin was raw still and red underneath the master chirurgeon's tiniest, most elegantly-wrought stitches, made so to diminish the scarring. Already, the tear was healing -- healing, yes, but still red.

It was this red, perhaps, a deep, angry red, that beckoned to something of similar hue deep within Estinien's aether. He saw Red. He smelled it. He felt a Red flow as it flooded. "Who touched you?" Estinien said in a voice not quite his own. "Which of them touched you? Which of them took what was _mine_?"

Aymeric startled, his own flood of rage subsiding against a flow more furious. "Fuck!" he said, as uncharacteristically vulgar as he'd been uncharacteristically enraged, "the Eye!" Quickly, heedless of his own pain and misery, he scrambled onto his knees and shuffled toward where Estinien stood by the side of the bed. It was his turn to soothe his voice into a coaxing. "I'm fine, Estinien. I'm fine now, my love," he said, taking the other man's shaking right fist into his own cool hands. With all the might of these calloused swordsman's hands, he forced the dragoon's fist open, then took it and raised it to his lips, placing a kiss in the center of Estinien's open palm.

As though Aymeric's kiss blistered his flesh more painfully than the Great Wyrm's fire, Estinien roared! And it was Nidhogg's roar, Nidhogg's will let loose from his Eye, the very relic Estinien carried to bolster his own power. Yet again The Eye tested his rage-weakened strength, dragon's essence corrupting the dragoon's.

Aymeric dove to bury his ears in the bed, the roar was so deafening, but he refused still to relinquish Estinien's hand, wresting his dearest back from the power that sought to control him through his rage. Fury's small mercies, it was enough. Aymeric felt Estinien's hand twitch within his own and the dragoon's eyes began to re-focus, seeking out his lord's limpid blue gaze.

"Aymeric!" he sobbed, and the voice was, blessedly, his own. "I'm so, so sorry, 'meric," Estinien continued, dropping down beside him on the bed and gathering his lover in his arms, tears streaming down his face. "I couldn't protect you, 'meric. I let them take you and hurt you." He clutched his knight tight, tight, tighter, and yet within that coiled embrace, Aymeric finally felt his release: he too started to sob, for himself, for Estinien, for the happiness wrested from them just as it had been within reach of their twined-together touch.

Bells passed and still they sat and sobbed, tears in their hair, tears on their faces, noses running and eyes weeping and wiping it all on each other, on the pillows, on the bed. Until they had headaches and were thirsty from crying their throats and sinuses raw, still they held each other and sobbed. And then they stopped.

"I love you, Aymeric," Estinien said in a low but clear voice. "Please let me help you heal," he pleaded.

"And I love you, Estinien," his lord returned. "Just hold me for now. 'Tis enough."


	7. Would Melt, Thaw, and Resolve Itself into a Dew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title here is the line immediately following that of the previous chapter's title. I find the first soliloquy in Hamlet a bounty in terms of Shakespeare for Everyday Use. Recently, I 've used the line "a beast that wants discourse of reason" in quite a few of the public interactions into which I'm forced. For example, when forced off a dedicated black diamond mountain bike trail by someone on foot's off-leash dog, I yelled, "a beast that wants discourse of reason wouldn't have a dog off-leash here." That I was on my back, immobilized, pinned by my bike and with my braids snagged in a pricker bush perhaps removed some of the bite from my invective, alas, but the lady moved off quickly. They almost always do when you start quoting Shakespeare. Useful.
> 
> The dream sequence here is inspired by The Secret World, the original game, not SWL. It's our favourite of the mmorpgs my husband and I have played over the years. I like to think TSW's creepy Lovecraftian mess of a world could stand in as the very darkest shard yet remaining of the Source and I'm thinking of writing a tsw/ffxiv story for like the four people who might be interested.

"He's dying. Aymeric is dying," reported Lucia, her expression vacant.

"Surely the wound was not that dire...," started Artoirel.

"It's not the wound," the woman interrupted, "at least according to Abel it isn't. It's his heart -- 'tis broken and the aether seeps out by his own will." Lucia let out a sudden sound that was something between a hiccup and a cry of pain. Quickly, she swallowed it down, trying to reassert her ever-present composure across her features, but the stifled sob persisted, insinuating itself into her shoulders, shaking now underneath the mass of those heavy pauldrons, making metal quake so her voice would not. Something popped into place inside the young Lord de Fortemps, seeing that anchor of a woman start to slip.

"My Lady," he began softly, then moved to gather her up to brace against his chest. To his surprise, she let him, pressing her silently sobbing face deep into the fur trim of his heavy alpine coat. "Surely Ser Aymeric will not allow himself to succumb to his grief while Ishgard burns. I _know_ he will not. He just needs the proper motivation," continued Artoirel, furrowing his brows. He heard the door to the Congregation open behind him, but did not move to release the First Commander; instead, again somewhat surprised by her acquiescence to his embrace, he slid his hand up to Lucia's nape, nuzzling her face in his neck while he rested his chin lightly atop her head.

Footsteps approached over the flagstones, footsteps and the light tapping of a walking stick. Artoirel swore he could actually _hear_ his father's lips as they stretched themselves out into a grin at the sight of him embracing Lucia. The younger Fortemps knew his father thought him cold, too cold for too long, a frigidity instilled deep within by a mother who loathed the paternal heat that had brought both a bastard into her home and mocking, derisive whispers at her back. As he held the Radiant in his arms, however, her flame undiminished even in sorrow, Artoirel began to feel the sensation of a melting. But now was not the time.

"Father," he said.

"I know," returned Lord Edmont, sorrow heavy in his voice. "I've spoken to the Captain. Losing Estinien has shattered his heart -- as much, perhaps, as the bearer of that so-named blade so recently shattered mine own." Edmont sighed. "I fear that we must, as ever, rely on our erstwhile saviour. Having lost her own...," the man's breath caught, "and... lived through it, perhaps she can succor Lord Aymeric in this perilous heartbreak of his."

The heavy doors of the Congregation flew open then, as if on cue (a passing flash of lightening with its accompanying thunder boom very much itched to flash and crack behind her, silhouetting her looming figure, but were convinced by the storm from which they hailed, that this wasn't the right-shaped world for that) to allow the entrance of a woman, if a woman she actually was, Edmont thought. He had his doubts.

A dark angel, perhaps, was a better description, with just a touch of the void, reflected as it was in the black demon horns arching up from her skull. These horns extended her height past seven feet, imposing even for a Roegadyn, and combined with her dark, dark skin, long white hair and glowing, pale eyes, her appearance was somehow, distinctly, not of this Star. All in black leather and heavy boots underneath a fur-lined cloak, she drew back an edge of the fur to reveal the silken sling across her chest. Edmont smiled. The babe was boisterous, flailing his limbs and burbling, growing impatient for his supper.

"I've come to sit with Aymeric," said the woman in a low soft voice. Edmont nodded. Artoirel just stared, still holding Lucia tight in his arms. With no opposition voiced, Bloom Rising, Hydalyn's Chosen and the Savior of Eorzea, among other more important titles, like mother, strode past them toward the infirmary.

Aymeric dreamed: "Be mindful of the voices....they corrupt. Be mindful of the voices...for they speak the truth." A woman in white, pale hair and features somewhat reminiscent of Lucia stood on one side of him, a man in black on the other. They spoke similar words, but vastly different worlds, and they stood in stars, but strange ones, nothing like any night sky of his own experience. "Hear...Feel...Think..." broke in another voice and the dueling man and woman collapsed and disappeared. Now _this_ voice was familiar, comforting even -- the Mother Crystal herself, Aymeric saw, drifting into familiar stars, ready now to commit himself into the sea of them.

"No!" someone shouted and Estinien was suddenly before him. With flaming red wings, he stood amidst these closer stars, beautiful, once again showing a brightness how to burn. "Dark Days are Coming, Aymeric! Dark Days are coming, my love!" he roared through the stillness. "In the place from which they hail, the dragons drip filth from their skin, boiling and smoking, pitting gurgling tar pools on the ground, and if you trip, fall in, you lose your mind! These are monsters even Nidhogg fears, fears them through his hate!" Estinien stopped, panting, his eyes so afraid. "We thought Ishgard harsh, Aymeric. It's sunshine compared to that creeping dark." Aymeric reached out then, propelling himself toward love instead of oblivion.

"Wait, 'meric," Estinien said then, in a softer voice. "I must tell you in case I... I can never return. There's a rose, a rose by another name, another colour. The days that come are coloured dark by it." The dragoon's eyes closed for a moment, as though in contemplation, then snapped back open. "You must be there to fight it, Aymeric. You must not die here!"

"Estinien!" Aymeric called out, reaching, reaching. "Please!" The dragoon took one step forward in space, surrendering himself to Aymeric's rushing embrace. They kissed, suddenly both exposed, naked, Estinien stripped even of his wings and the burning red of his Nidhogg-imbued eyes. Both stared into blue now, each pair of eyes open wide, refusing to close to the longed-for sight of the other. Then, arms wrapping tight around waists, grasping hard to erase any hint of distance, they became more frantic, their fevered embrace a contrast to the slowly spinning stars in which they stood. Estinien paused, resting his cheek on Aymeric's shoulder, exhausted.

"Aymeric, hearken to my words," he said in the softest of whispers, as though he didn't wish to be overheard. "There is a chance. With Nidhogg's fear, there is a doubt. In that doubt, I may have a chance at freedom," he continued. "The boy. Sweet boy! Like my own Hamignant returned to me! He already plots my salvation, even without knowing of the doubt in Nidhogg's mind or the impending darkness that fuels it. Bloom too. Even with Haurchefant's babe at her teat, right now, as she sits here while you try to sleep yourself to death, she thinks on how to win me my freedom from the beast...and mourns the possibility of having to kill me within him. Help them, Aymeric! Your death means mine own, because it will break them both."

"'stinien, my dearest," Aymeric whispered against Estinien's skin, continuing to kiss a line from ear to jaw as he listened to the other man speak. He felt their separation imminent and was unable, thus, to stop touching, stop kissing, stop wanting his dreaming beloved.

"And Ishgard! Ishgard! Sweet Fury-fucked Ishgard! We've all given so much of ourselves to it. Don't let it burn, Blue! Don't let Ishgard burn!" exhorted Estinien, now cupping Aymeric's face between his two hands, gazing deep into his eyes. "Wake up, Aymeric! Wake up!" he pleaded. Aymeric stared, willing his eyes to stay focused, to keep looking, keep _seeing_ his beloved's lovely face. He fought the blinking he felt coming on, fought to keep Estinien's eyes within the cone of his staring. The burn, the urge to close to erase it, the pain and his terror at the thought that this might be his last glimpse, he fought against it all, fought with a returning will to strength... and then gave in. Ser Aymeric de Borel blinked a world away, perhaps more than one, and his dearest love with it.

And he woke up, gasping and sweating in his infirmary bed.

"Aymeric," said Bloom in her low, quiet voice. She looked at him hard for a moment, not bothering to inquire after his well-being, to scurry to pour him some much-needed water, to wipe the tears and snot and streaming sweat from his achingly beautiful face; instead she just stared, frozen. It was not Aymeric at all, but another who broke her reverie. Sensing the strange stillness of his mother, a pause that nigh slowed the milk flowing from her teat, Glowing Greystone howled.

Bloom's eyelids twitched, flickering, as though waking from a cat-like sleep, her eyes open as she dreamed. Aymeric looked too, startled by a sound so unfamiliar. After leading her babe to latch on again at her teat, Bloom sighed. "You saw him then," she said to Aymeric. It was not a question.

"Yes," he croaked out, his voice a hoarse whisper. "He whispered to the stars as he held me, whispered all manner of...strange things."

"Dark Days are coming," Bloom sighed out yet again. "I know it." She looked especially thoughtful as her child unlatched himself from her breast, this time without a cry. Careful, she sat her son upright in her lap, supporting his too-heavy head with her large palm braced against his chest, his chin resting on the tendon spread between thumb and index finger. With her free hand, she rubbed circles on his back, hoping to elicit a burping. But the child's guts were stubborn, like most everything else about him, his mother was learning. In the meantime, Aymeric had his first good look at Haurchefant's child.

The babe was striking, his skin a light, shining grey that truly did glow like silver. His Hellsguard name was appropriate, the Lord Commander thought: a Greystone he might be -- child of a bastard still, if not a bastard himself -- but he certainly was a Glowing one. With his head already covered in the soft, candy-floss fluff that passed for hair in infants, coloured icy, pastel blue, nonetheless, his ears pointed and slightly protruding, and his eyes the true sky-blue for which the sons of House Fortemps were noted, the baby's heritage was undeniable. He was bigger, though, than most elezen infants, broader and heavier, and, Aymeric noted, the tiniest bony black nubs already protruded from either side of his skull, another gift from his mother, but one that had little to do with her being roe.

"I hope he has his father's nose," Bloom said quietly, noticing how Aymeric studied the babe. "It was...splendid," she said, just a hint of a rueful grin around her lips. His sense of timing nearly as impeccable as his sire's, the baby chose that exact moment to turn his mother from her sorrow by expelling a quantity of gas from his guts in far excess of what anyone would think such a small body capable of containing. The burp resounded off the walls, echoing. Both Bloom and Aymeric laughed and the child tried to maneuver its teetering head to see from whence the low smooth chuckle, a new sound to him, had commenced. Glowing looked at Aymeric, trying to focus his gaze.

"He's beautiful, Bloom," Aymeric said quietly.

"Your Godsson, you mean?" she answered, staring pointedly into his widening eyes. "Aye, that's what Haurchefant wished -- for you to be his Halonic Guardian, his Godsfather." She broke the gaze and seemed to nod to herself. "We discussed it."

"Bloom..." Aymeric started, shocked.

"He's going to be formally acknowledged, you know. At the christening... he and I both, I imagine. Not that I care to bear a name my husband was denied, but...I think Haurchefant would have liked this for our son," Bloom paused, thoughtful. "I _know_ he would want you to be there, to stand up for him, to pledge your support to a little Ishgardian lordling who will loom above his peers, outmatch them in strength, and stare with Fortemps-blue eyes out of a demon-horned skull. Regardless of his birth, life does not promise ease for Glowing Greystone de Fortemps. He needs you, Aymeric."

"I...I,"Aymeric stuttered, tongue-tied.

"He needs you, and _you_ need Estinien, I know." Bloom sighed again, so full of sighs, but perhaps that was because she was still so much in love. "That's why I mean to go fetch him back for you. But I require your help, my friend," she paused again, her eyes on something distant, unseen. "Dark Days are coming. _Something wicked_ is coming, between storms and shadows; _it_ is coming indeed. And I need you to help me fight it, you and Estinien both." She looked to her lap and began to re-settle a drowsy Glowing back into his silken sling.

"You will have me, Bloom, my pledge and my sword in service to you and your child," the Lord Commander said, a hot blood flowing again underneath his skin, urging him to action. "But first, as mine own love admonished, I must not let Ishgard burn!" He sat up, clutched at his belly as a whimper of pain escaped his lips, steeled himself and swung his legs off the bed to stand. Bloom did not move to help.


	8. Dost Thou Fall Upon Thy Face?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Juliet! I so freaking love Juliet! Hamlet may be my favourite play, but Juliet, to me, even now that I'm in my forties, is still the best damned character in the canon--the whole canon, all of it, not just Shakespeare. I mean, this not quite fourteen-year-old kid, same age as my son, younger than my daughter now, well, she's just such a dynamo. She tells Romeo to stop kissing "by the book," to stop swearing "by the moon," to stop trying to "reckon" love, and, in doing so, turns him from his broody, playing-at-love self at the beginning of the play, a guy who throws stale lines at Rosaline and then pouts when they're not well-received, to someone who is capable of burning so hard that he himself, like he says of Juliet when he first sees her, teaches the very "torches to burn bright."
> 
> I also love Juliet's relationship with her Nurse-- truly the model for the connection I've tried to establish between Aymeric and my OC Yvonne. The exchange where she encourages Aymeric to "Fall Forward," is entirely stolen from R&J, Act 1, Scene 3,when the Nurse recounts a moment from Juliet's childhood where she too takes a tumble. Seriously, go read it; it's awesome. Seriously, go read the whole damned play. So good!

At the very edge of the Forgotten Knight's roof, Estinien Wyrmblood sat. He dangled his legs into the nothingness beneath them and still delighted, after all these moons, in being able to move the various parts of his body solely according to his own desires. Now, if only all those parts could return to what they were before the Great Wyrm had seen fit to inhabit him. He had changed: one cannot cry havoc for most of one's young life and not expect the dogs of war thus unloosed to leave one unmarked.

Wiggling his fingers in front of his eyes, he watched how the clipped claws slowly but inexorably grew back to sharp points. _He_ could see them, could feel them too if he pressed them into the palms of his hands; very little pressure was required to make pointed, pin-prick marks. Bloom could feel them too, when he scratched them across her arm to demonstrate. She could feel the shape of his tongue, itself longer and rougher now, the texture of a coeurl's. He had licked her across the back of her held-out hand before gently pressing a tip of a cruelly sharp fang into her wrist. Bloom had _felt_ the difference, the changes. But even she couldn't _see_ them.

Without even reaching up, Estinien could feel the curling nubs protruding from either side of his skull. He'd been really disappointed Bloom couldn't see the horns, a mark of kinship between them, he thought. But _he_ could see them, again, and such an obvious draconic touch made him nervous. He could cover those though, coiling braided strands of his own hair around them to form knots like a miquo'te's ears perched high on his head -- Aymeric thought them cute. _Aymeric_ , he sighed to himself.

A simple alteration to his hair could do nothing, however, to shuffle back Estinien's insides into a semblance of their previous arrangement. He wasn't angry, but he was anxious, easily startled, quick to feel cornered, as though he were watched. Never quite comfortable inside the Knight's stifling crowds before his possession by the Wyrm, now he could abide not even the thought of stepping inside the tavern's Starlight-swelled festivity. The doors thudded open and closed beneath him. Opened and closed, creak and whoosh and thud, over and over, as the newly-minted drunks spilled out to sing carols in the seemingly fairy-lit streets.

Another creak and whoosh and thud, footsteps, then silence.

"But soft," he thought he heard a voice whisper beneath him, and Estinien tensed, immediately on guard. If someone was indeed trying to catch him unawares, however, muttering self-admonishments advocating stealth seemed a poor course of action.

"What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and 'stinien's the sun," loudly rang out the now unmistakable voice underneath the dragoon. Sweet Halone, Estinien thought, Aymeric was surely as drunk as he'd ever seen him, kneeling down on one knee two stories below him, with his sword arm outstretched toward the silver-haired man on the roof and the other hand clutched to his own breast. Estinien would tease him.

"I fear thou art mistaken, my friend," Estinien said, laughing. "Thou art too much in the sun to see clearly, shining, as ever, so like that star. I am but a satellite of a satellite circling 'round thee."

"So...," said Aymeric, staggering to uncertain feet and trying to work out the conceit in his drink-muddled mind. "A moon then!" he shouted through a hiccup, startling even himself with his drunken cleverness. "Thou _art_ more like a moon, my Silver," Aymeric said. "Then let me swear by thee..."

"The moon, Aymeric?" Estinien asked, cocking an inquiring eyebrow his friend could likely not see from the ground. "Oh, swear not by the moon, 'meric, that monthly changes in her circled orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable."

"Fine, fine, clever Silver, clever Moon...have it your own way then," said Aymeric throwing both hands clumsily in the air to signal his exasperation. "How about this one, then," he said, pointedly clearing his throat in preparation. "Nymph, in thy orisons," he began, reaching out both hands now toward Estinien, palms up, beseeching, "be all my sins remembered?"

"What sins, Angel?" yelled the silver-haired man before lightly pushing himself from the roof to land crouched on the balls of his feet, supplicant before his drunken lord. He grabbed Aymeric by the waist as he straightened to stand and spun the man clear off his feet in his grasping embrace. In retrospect, the spinning was probably not such a good idea. Aymeric's golden skin briefly took on the patina of aged and weather-beaten copper; he got green around the gills. But he recovered, leaning against Estinien for a moment, breathing heavily. Too close, Estinien thought to himself; Aymeric's heat and the mingled smell of his breath and skin -- the orange-flavoured brandy and the bergamot cologne -- pulling him yet closer. He properly distanced by propping a shoulder underneath the other man's arm and turning them from facing to walking side-by-side. "If I recall," he said, clearing the husk from his own throat, forcing his tone light, "the ending of that last speech is rather unfortunate. Are you bent, then, on dispatching me to a nunnery? Shall I be cloistered?"

"No," said Aymeric, stopping them up and turning to look Estinien straight in the eye, holding his gaze for a beat. "That is the very last thing for which I might wish," he said, suddenly appearing much less drunk. Estinien blinked.

They didn't speak of it any longer. Aymeric would neither needle nor nag; Estinien no longer had to deny him. The sable-haired lord resignedly accepted that his silver-haired love refused to touch him, mostly because of claws and fangs, rough tongue and horns and scales that Aymeric himself could neither see nor feel. Though upon reflection, the knight thought, there was yet a touch of still-festering guilt in Estinien's refusal, guilt over his inability to prevent Aymeric's violation at the hands of a Heavensward long dead.

Aymeric himself was...recovering from his night in the Vault. He felt stronger, better. While he would never feel entirely comfortable underground or confined to small spaces, and while he still flinched sometimes when touched unawares, still felt his skin swarming with vilekin, he had always known that his rape was about a brutal need to inflict shame and pain and mortification upon both his body and spirit. It had never been about the sex. Thus recognizing this single undeniable fact, the knight felt his desire for the dragoon by his side to be wholly undiminished. He still desperately wanted Estinien.

"I'm tired, Estinien, and cold," began Aymeric, resting his head on his friend's shoulder as he turned forward to recommence their slow crawl toward Borel manor. "Sleep with me tonight?" he asked with a yawn. "I promise I'll be out before I can even think to whine for you, but it would be nice to feel you there while I'm dreaming."

"Alright," answered Estinien. Aymeric's bed was spacious enough to accommodate the dragoon's sleeping sprawl without the risk of touch -- though Estinien would sometimes risk it anyway, unbeknownst to his sleeping lord. Some nights, when his need overwhelmed, he would slowly, every-so-slowly, creep his leg over toward Aymeric's to gently touch the ball of his ankle against the other man's. He would stay like that for several minutes, acutely aware of the heat pressed to that scant inch of skin just barely connecting him to his beloved. Then he would start to move, rubbing his ankle in a slow circle around the protruding ball of his lord's similar joint. He would circle and rub, hardening as he did it, building until he was desperate to come. But he would stop himself just short of it; if Aymeric was still to be denied, Estinien could not yet indulge. He'd pull back his leg, retreat, wait to soften, and stare into the dark until dawn.

"Estinien," said Aymeric, pulling the other man from his reverie. "What say you to my bequeathing Naegling to my Godsson upon my eventual retirement?" he asked, gesturing, as they passed it, towards the house in which that child now slumbered, Fortemps manor.

"I've no reservation other than the fact that, despite your achievements, oh, _Lord of Lords_ ," he teased in a lilting voice, "you are still a young man, Aymeric. You might yet sire a child...of your own," he answered, tone dropping from teasing lightness to something heavier at the implication of the last few words.

"Unless you decide to go and get yourself possessed by Vidofnir next time, and subsequently come into possession of some kind of phantom womb to match your ghostly claws and fangs, I think it to be highly unlikely," answered Aymeric, more sharply than he'd intended. "I'm sorry, Estinien; that was cruel," he said immediately, looking down, ashamed of himself.

"It's alright, Aymeric. Be not vexed," answered Estinien, his voice low and gentle. "In fact, it may be time for you to...to seek your satisfaction elsewhere."

"That, my dear, my sweetest, sweetest Silver, is an impossibility; if it be not in within your arms, let satisfaction ever elude me," Aymeric replied, resolute. "The ripeness is all, Estinien, and perhaps our love is not yet quite ripe for the picking." Estinien simply swallowed hard and nodded, trying to hold back hot tears as they reached Borel manor and shut its doors behind them.

One moon later, Estinien having made off to somewhere in Othard of all places, tracking Bloom most likely, always staying close, Aymeric sat in his library and wept. He was so lonely: Haurchefant's laughter was, of course, only to be heard in his memories; Estinien had buggered off, and even Lucia was no longer as readily available for drinks or a quiet game of chess. He smiled a little at the thought of her, out of her armor more often now that she'd allowed herself within the arms of Artoirel de Fortemps -- still in the dark though, mostly in the dark. He hoped they would come into the light soon; the shadows were no place for love.

"Lord Aymeric," he heard Yvonne's voice calling from down the corridor. "Will you take your tea now?"

"Of course, of course. Please come in, Yvonne," he answered, hastily wiping at his still tear-streaked face with the sleeve of his tunic, of all things, a handkerchief out of reach. The door opened and Yvonne rolled in the tea cart. She was about to just fix his cup herself -- after all, she knew just how he liked it and he had no company today, no one for whom the ritual of pouring was required -- but she stopped when she glanced up and saw his reddened, puffy-eyed face.

"Aymeric, love!" she exclaimed, forgetting even the obligatory honorific in her concern. She scuttled over to her dear boy and took his teary face to her bosom. "Don't fash yerself so, little love," she soothed, dropping into the dialect of her youth. "He'll soon return to ye, my dear; Estinien always comes home."

"Aye," Aymeric acknowledged, "but even when he does he'll barely touch me. He won't _touch_ me. Not since... and then when he..," Aymeric could finish neither thought.

"Well, then, my dearest," began Yvonne, her expression turning firm, "perhaps it is time that _you touched him_." Aymeric just stared at her. "Come now, laddie, it's not as though you weren't made for it, made for _loving_ , with that body, that face," she continued, matter-of-fact. "When you were yet toddling, first learning to walk -- I remember it as though it were yesterday, so pregnant was I with my first then -- your blessed mother and I were shadowing your awkward little steps, hovering, two hens to one chick. You took three steps, faltered, and fell straight back onto your swaddled rump," she paused, chuckling to herself at the memory. "I forgot myself at the sight and, laughing, asked if you wouldn't fall forward when you came of age. And you looked at me, blinking, and said, 'Aye,' plain as day. You said 'Aye.' It was your first word, Aymeric," she said, smiling at him sweetly, tears in her own eyes now. "You had the right of it then, love. Yes, you did. And now it's time, I think, high time e'en, that you fell forward into Estinien."

"I wouldn't know where to begin," said Aymeric, his cheeks now two shades past beet and onto cherry red.

"Well, fortunately, I do. Come now, my lord, Gerard is out. Let me betray some of the secrets of our marriage bed," she said, taking her lordling by the wrist and pulling him up and out of the library. He followed her to the rooms she had shared with her husband for over thirty years. It was comfortable within, clean and bright, but Yvonne marched him straight through the lounge and into her bedroom, where she sat Aymeric on the edge of the bed and pulled open wide all the drawers of her bedside chest. Aymeric's eyes widened in shock: there were shackles, crops, silken rope and a good quantity of what he could only assume were various unguents in stoppered glass bottles.

"What have you been doing all these years, Yvonne?" asked the lord.

"My husband is an Ishgardian elezen, Aymeric," answered the woman. "What _haven't_ I been doing?" She smiled warmly, two births and many years of marriage past the possibility of embarrassment, and shuffled around in the very bottom drawer of her nightstand. Drawing something out, something largish, consisting mostly of leather and buckles, she set it on the bed before returning to the drawer to pluck out another item wrapped up in a red silk scarf. "It's quartz," she said, unwrapping a large crystal phallus and placing it beside the buckled leather, obviously a harness of some sort. "It can be heated by holding above the fire, or cooled in the snow. It's...nice, really," she said, with not a hint of a blush, just a touch of wistfulness in her expression. "You put it in here," she said, demonstrating where the dildo inserted into the harness, "and, then, even if you don't happen to possess the particular apparatus for the job, well... the act can still be accomplished most handily."

"You do this to...Gerard?" asked Aymeric, stuttering.

"Yes, love. Yes I do, sometimes at least. When you've been making love to the same person for over thirty years, variety can be pleasant," she replied, still matter-of-fact. "But the reason I tell you this, my dear, isn't to shock or mortify, but to show you that if even _I_ can do it, so can you. There's nothing more natural."

"I can...do this?" he sputtered out in a small, timid voice, almost as though he were asking for permission.

"Yes, Aymeric. You can do it. And _you_ won't even need the harness," she replied, laughing sweetly and hugging him to her bosom yet again, where they both cried a little. Then the little hyuran woman, the only mother he had left, spent the next bell and a half patiently explaining just precisely how Aymeric could stop waiting for Estinien's touch.


	9. Lull'd in These Flowers with Dances and Delight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shakespeare actually wrote only two plays that were entirely original; the rest all had sources, history sometimes, but, more often than not, he based his plays on the stories of others, the characters of others. This appropriation was a defining feature of the Renaissance stage. Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Kit Marlowe, Ben Jonson and the rest of the crew were always borrowing concepts and characters, both from one another and from older works. In fact, it isn't until we get to the Romantic period that the notion of Authorial Integrity, of "the Author" itself gains traction. 
> 
> So, imagine, the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage, one of only three Great Periods of Drama in history, was not all that unlike the community of fan fiction writers and readers you folks have created here. Like Shakespeare, you take source texts and source characters and you make them your own. You could be doing nothing. You could be watching Netflix or YouTube. Instead, you're making something; you're making art. And you're encouraging each other with both continued readership and commentary, building ties. I find that to be utterly marvelous...splendid, even. Thanks for letting me join for a while.

"Still," said Estinien, lance point poised above that which had seen him nearly to his death throes, "better safe than sorry." He struck, spearing the Eye of Nidhogg -- the relic that had ridden him to rage and then redemption -- into curling black aether. Then he stabbed its mate into a similar oblivion. "There," proud Ishgard's former Azure Dragoon whispered, standing amidst the flood of red and white flowers where the Eyes had fallen with the Garlean Prince, "there ends your hateful legacy."

He turned to face the sunset, skies fading to pink and orange behind the sand-coloured towers of the Ala Mhigan palace, and in all that glorious palette of co-mingled colour, all the pink and orange, red and white and gold, Estinien saw only Blue.

"An end, then, to hating," said the Lord Commander of the Temple Knights, here in Ala Mhigo at the head of Ishgard's contribution to the allied forces, "here on this very spot," he paused, "and a beginning to our long-deferred love."

Aymeric started to stalk slowly towards him, then, drawing the soft, Borel-blue tunic over his head and tossing it to the flowers, and Estinien realized that he was not asking; his lord had come prepared to take. "Sometimes, Estinien," said the sable-haired man, confirming the other's suspicions as to his intentions, "it is better to be sorry than safe."

"De-flowered amidst the flowers then?" asked Estinien with that slightest of wry grins he sometimes wore.

"Yes," replied Aymeric. "The both of us." He stepped on the heel of his left boot to yank out his foot, then kicked the looser right one straight off into the distance. Hooking the top of his trousers with his thumbs, peeling them down and off his legs -- he wore nothing underneath -- Aymeric dropped to his knees directly in front of Estinien. Then he slowly rose, a cobra charmed from the basket, pausing on the way to draw his outstretched tongue over the exposed leather of Estinien's crotch, over the patterned scarf and coiled belts that encircled his waist and, finally, up and over his Ice Heart chest plate, tasting cold metal.

"Did you just _lick my armor_ , Aymeric?" asked Estinien, his voice equally incredulous and aroused. The dark-haired knight, naked now, completely exposed to both the Ala Mhigan breeze and the gaze of any revelers who happened to stray from the celebrations in the city below, simply grinned, half-shrugged and pressed the tongue in question straight into his lover's mouth. His hands floated to Estinien's pauldrons, sliding this way and that, skittering over steel surface, as they searched for a latch or clasp, for any hint of the mechanism that might provide an opening.

"It's lovely, Estinien, your new plate," said his lord, pulling back enough so that his lips could be put to other use than pressing Estinien's. "But I don't know how to work it, yet."

"You will, Blue. You will," replied the dragoon. He slid off his gauntlets and tossed them gently into the pile started by Aymeric's discarded clothing. Then he placed his hands over his lord's and guided him in the melting of yet another rime he'd allowed to freeze over his hot-bleeding heart. The rest of this outer-most frost followed quickly to the flowers, until Estinien was stripped bare as Aymeric, standing chest to naked chest amidst the gloaming hints of Ala Mhigo's first emancipated night. Stars peeked out. The moon rose, gibbous, Estinien's silver head haloing, Aymeric's levin eyes limning. Still, they stood and stared, watching as the wind took liberties with each other's hair, ruffling and tossing.

"What's that?" asked Estinien, pointing to the crystal vial Aymeric had fastened to a long silver chain around his neck. He hadn't noticed it intially, against Aymeric's bare skin, perhaps because it was the exact colour of the ever-present earring dangling from his left lobe, a beautiful colour, but difficult to name: was it teal or aquamarine? Robin's egg, turquoise, sapphire, ice? Even azure? No. It was none of these. Estinien knew this absolutely, if only because the colour of the ubiquitous earring and new necklace exactly matched the colour of Aymeric's other-worldly eyes. Indeed, he thought to himself, it would surely take a New Heaven, New Earth to place a true name to such a perilous shade.

"Oh," answered Aymeric, reaching up a hand to grasp the pendant. "It's...ah..."

"Oh," mirrored Estinien, his eyes widening and the corner of his mouth twitching unbidden. "I see." He moved then, reaching for the hand his love held clutched tight over the pendant. Prying it loose, Estinien lowered himself to his petal-strewn bed, drawing Aymeric slowly down over him. Thus framed against a backdrop of stars, as the dragoon stared up at him, Aymeric's eyes looked enough at home to make his silver-haired lover willingly pledge himself forever to the night.

Estinien opened his massive, martial thighs wide, his range of motion impressive even for an Ishgardian dragoon, and his lord pressed slim hips between them. "I want...," started the dragoon, then stopped short, swallowing. "I want..., he began again, but his voice was cut off by the sudden tears that tightened his throat. "I want you...," he sobbed out, chest heaving, his voice forced high, cracking, breaking finally into a full, shuddering weeping. "I want you inside of me, Aymeric."

"I love you, Estinien," Aymeric whispered, his own tears dripping down to join the streaming flow of unbanked emotion spilling down his lover's face.

"I'm frightened, 'meric," Estinien nearly barked out through his tears. And that was it, really, wasn't it? The fear. Beneath the anger -- Estinien's endless irksome ire -- had always been the fear. To love was to submit to the possibility of loss. He had learned that maxim at far too young an age, a rage-nurturing truth that had driven him to eschew close connection, fearing loss. Thus, his courage now, stripped of his rage along with his armor, exceeded any Estinien had ever shown against dragons.

Though a desire common to sex, spoken surely as soon as lips learned words to speak, to invite another inside one's own body was always the braving of a startlingly spirit-deep, aching vulnerability. At its most basic, the act itself contained its own loss; climax achieved, one's lover could do naught but retreat, could do nothing but leave. And then, of course, there was always the possibility of dissolution, of lovers parting, memories of their shared intimacy becoming an ache like a shield bash to the gut while sparring.

Even considering the most desired outcome, a firm, lasting bond between loving partners, a place like Eorza offered no certainties. Any act of violence could take Aymeric away from him; indeed, assassination had already been attempted. And even if they lived to old age, unlikely as that was considering their respective vocations, they'd be taken from one another eventually, at least for a time, perhaps to be reunited in Halone's Blessed Halls. For Estinien then, with his history of fear still written fresh on his heart, to invite a joining that all but promised a loss, was, again, an act of bravery that truly confirmed him as Ishgard's mightiest hero.

Aymeric smiled down at him, still crying, and, if, despite himself, Estinien couldn't help but think it was like sunshine through the rain, he can perhaps be forgiven the staleness of the expression. Hands shaking, the former Azure Dragoon reached to the vial that now hung down to rest upon his own chest and un-stoppered it, tipped it quickly into his palm and then replaced the cap. Reaching between their bellies, he curled his fingers around the base of Aymeric's penis and slid his palm up and down his lord's length, spreading the oil as he stroked him. Aymeric exhaled a soft sigh and fluttered his long, black eyelashes shut.

"Sweet Fury, that feels _so good_ , Estinien," he whispered, voice low. Estinien, even still weeping, couldn't help but shiver to himself at the other man's obvious pleasure. He moved his hands to Aymeric's hips, trying to push him into position. "Wait! Not yet!" said Aymeric. "We must still.... Yvonne said..."

"Yvonne?" croaked out Estinien, his voice hoarse with crying. "What in Halone's Highest House could Yvonne tell you about _this_?"

"You would be surprised," replied his lover.

"I would be shocked," said Estinien, his eyes growing wide with incredulity, and Aymeric couldn't help but laugh. Then he bent to kiss the other man, re-opened the vial that hung between them, and proceeded to acquaint his dragoon with the full extent of Yvonne's knowledge.

It was when Estinien first jolted and cried out his knight's name, pushing his cock further down Aymeric's throat as the dark-haired man's gentle fingers stroked him from the inside, coaxing his prostate to pleasure, that the Temple Knight's Lord began to feel more in command. Still, when they came to it finally, and he stared down at Estinien beneath him, his starlit hair fanned-out over a bed of red blossoms, his eyes still leaking tears, Aymeric couldn't deny his own apprehension.

"Forgive me, my dearest, but I'm an absolute novice here," he whispered as he carefully positioned the dragoon's fluid legs over his own shoulders, "Could you help place me?" Estinien nodded, silent and swallowing, reaching between them again, never taking his eyes from Aymeric's, and did as his lord asked. Then, brows creasing, gaze locked with Estinien's, searching steel eyes for the slightest quiver of pain, Aymeric pushed...into heaven itself. Yvonne was right, he thought, in those exquisite first moments of his pleasure: _nothing_ _could be more natural._

Estinien made a small noise, something between a hiccough and a sigh, and his lord was on immediate alert.

"Am I hurting you?" Aymeric asked.

Estinien just shook his head, stoic. "I'm fine," he said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand and trying to settle his expression into its familiar smirk. "Pray continue," he said, facetious, gesturing his hand in a mock invitation. "I've felt far worse burnings." His eyes, however, could not hide his discomfort from his lover's scrutiny when Aymeric, taking him at his word, allowed himself to sink full deep inside his Silver.

"Ohhh, Estinien. Sweet Fury's blessings," Aymeric exhaled, closing his eyes for a moment, wrapped in sensation. When he opened them again, however, he noticed Estinien's obvious discomfort and stilled himself completely. "We just have to wait for a moment," he said, suddenly unable to stop himself from beaming at Estinien as he reverently stroked the still-wet edge of his lover's slicing sharp cheekbone. "Your body should become more...compliant."

"According to Yvonne?" Estinian smirked, cocking an eyebrow.

"According to Yvonne," Aymeric nodded and bent down to kiss him.

Estinien embraced stillness for a moment, a state somewhat alien to him up to this point. He concentrated on feeling, on feeling Aymeric within. "You're...in me," he said, haltingly, almost in disbelief.

"I am," his Blue returned, the dark-haired man's smile approaching the very limits of what happiness a facial expression could portray, the very platonic ideal of a smile.

"We couldn't be any...closer," Estinien whispered, tears unbidden again flooding his eyes. Still, he was gradually relaxing into the sensations of his body, and, feeling that, Aymeric poured into his hand the last bit of oil contained within his pendant flask. He reached between them to adjust his lover's scrotum so none of that most sensitive skin was in any danger of being pinched between their bodies and then stroked Estinien's penis from the very depth of its base to its pale pink head. "Ahhh, Aymeric," Estinien sighed, pushing up into his lover's hand, and, in the process, inadvertently grinding his own prostate against Aymeric's buried cock. The pleasure was intense. "'meric!" he cried out sharply.

"What is it?" asked his lord, alarmed. "Are you hurt?" He stilled his hand on his lover's length.

Estinien willed himself to stillness again, and it was a true struggle this time, as much as he wanted to grind his insides on Aymeric's cock, to thrust his own length into Aymeric's warm hand. He stilled himself, nevertheless, and looked deep in Aymeric's eyes. "Move in me, 'meric," he said, his own eyes soft and wet and pleading. "Move in me, please. Make love to me, Aymeric."

"I so want to make love to you, Estinien, my 'stinian," returned his lord, his eyes shining again, dazzling, "but if I allow my body to make the amount of it necessary to show the true extent of my feeling, I fear we will nigh be buried in love."

"A New Heaven, New Earth, again, then," Estinien answered, voicing the thought this time, "wide enough to admit the full extent of the love we make together."

"Let's find them, then, my sweetest Silver," Aymeric returned, his eyes narrowing. "Let's find them together."

He began to move, then, in earnest, slowly at first, then speeding. Estinien responded, arching up to meet those first, tentative thrusts, and then urging him faster with his sweet murmurings of a groaning "Oh" over and over and over again.

They drove themselves frantic, frenzied in the flowers, Estinien bucking up so hard into Aymeric that he nigh thrust their joined bodies from the ground, making his lover lose his balance for a moment and tumble forward onto the dragoon's chest. Forced to cease his adamant stroking of his partner's cock, Aymeric moved to brace his hands on either side of Estinien's chest, intending to push himself to his former position hovering over the dragoon, his weight braced on forearms, hands and wrists.

Estinien was having none of it; he forced his own sinewy arms within where Aymeric's were braced, and, pushing out abruptly with a snarling cry of " _mine_ ," knocked his knight's arms out from under him, forcing Aymeric to collapse back down on the dragoon's own chest. Then the silver-haired man wrapped his arms tight around his sable-haired lover's back, pressing him close against his own naked and battered chest, refusing to allow even the thought of a retreat. Their lips were so close now they couldn't help but meet, the softness of their kisses belying the increasing fervor of their lower joining.

It was still, of course, Aymeric's first time inside anyone -- his first time being fully and truly intimate ever. And Estinien, despite his extensive prior experience, had never felt the intensity of sex imbued with honest emotion. Thus, they were both close now to that named thing that unnamed: the orgasm, climax, the coming into a leaving, for a scant few moments, of one's sense of space, time, self -- a little death, some called it, accurate in that one's very presence was eclipsed in pleasure.

Estinien noticed Aymeric tense, felt him draw back. Pulling back to look into his eyes, he noted the distance therein.

"Don't 'meric," he whispered. "Don't let your thoughts range from me to make yourself abide. I'm close," the dragoon said as he moved to grip Aymeric's ass, palming a cheek in each of his large hands and pressing his lover more firmly into him. "Come inside now, my love," he continued, "and I will surely follow."

Thus it was that Estinien Wyrmblood bore witness to the distinctly startling sight of Aymeric de Borel's extraordinary, unearthly, dazzling blue eyes as they crossed in his head, irises meeting above his perfect nose, with the terrific force of only his second orgasm in company.

"Are you alright?" he had barely time to ask, slightly concerned at the way his lord scrunched his crossed eyes tight into a cherry-red face, before Aymeric's wild thrusting and twitching inside of him unmade Estinien completely, his own vision blurring as his cock pulsed seed to seep between their pressed together skin. "Oh 'meric, oh 'meric, oh 'meric," he panted, re-shaping the first syllable of his lover's name to the sound of his own pleasure as he forgot Ishgard and Nidhogg and the Azure Dragoon and even Estinien himself.

"I'm...fine," answered Aymeric after a moment, his body shaking hard as he strained to roll off Estinien, fearing to suffocate, and settled himself at his lover's side, his head and arm still draped over the other man's chest. "I just need a moment...to rest," he continued. "I love you, 'stinien," he muttered before he started to emit an even, rhythmic noise that sounded like the soft cooing of a dove. Sweet Fury, thought Estinien -- as he ever did when he slept in his knight's presence -- even his snoring is lovely.

"I love you, Aymeric," he mumbled, his own eyes blinking shut despite his attempt to focus on the night sky above him. He could have sworn something streaked through the darkness above, something skewing stars, making them strange. Huh, Estinien thought idly to himself, it seems we've gone and found a New Heaven indeed. Blearily marveling at the thought, he pressed Aymeric tighter to his chest, wrapping both arms around his slumbering lord, and succumbed to sleep himself.

Bells later, toward dawn, footsteps drew toward the sleeping lovers' bed. Bloom Rising had no need of that second part of her name: she'd never fallen to sleep that night. Restless and heartsore, missing her yet-toddling son, still sighing her near-endless sighs for her dead husband, she found herself drawn toward the spot where her most recent nemesis had made his last stand.

And, thus, she had happened upon a stranger beast than even Lord Zenos. While not a beast with two backs -- she was at least spared the embarrassment of stumbling upon them in the act -- she still couldn't help being startled at the sight of Ishgard's Lord Speaker and its former Azure Dragoon naked and asleep, their long bodies tangled together and twined amidst the flowers.

She smiled then, once the surprise diminished. About time, she thought. The Ala Mhigan breeze seemed to agree with her, sweeping up behind her, pushing her forward with a singular force. Bloom froze, almost literally. That was not a wind containing the chill of desert nights; it was something far colder, with a hint of falling snow and... chocolate.

"Haurchefant!" she cried out, unheeding, and the lovers stirred in their flowered bed, but fortunately did not wake.

The wind answered her plea, whirling around her body as though tutored by the hand of the Ixal's Primal Goddess, embracing her completely before drawing tight to close her right fist in its spinning pressure. A miniature whirlwind spun 'round her hand for moments, touching her, as best it could, then retreating entirely, leaving her alone once more.

Bloom sunk to her knees and sobbed. After several long moments, when her tears had somewhat abated, she became cognizant of holding something in the palm of her wind-touched hand, something small and smooth and round. She opened it. Ah, she thought, and smiled through the last of her sobs, the crytallized distillate of a Paladin Knight's soul -- a father's own soul -- meant to be passed to his son. The stone was coloured grey and it was still glowing, warm as a beating heart. Bloom pressed her hand back around it and breathed, looking up toward the stars.

Huh, she thought, staring up. There's something not quite right up there... or perhaps something finally put right. Still, she reckoned, the heavens were not quite as familiar as they'd been the night before. Subtle though was the shifting, in a far, far corner of the night-dark sky the stars had rounded themselves into an upward-turning crescent, the very slightest hint of a smile staring down.


End file.
